


The Roots that Clutch

by TheCryingClub



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Adam Parrish is Bad at Feelings, Adoption, Alive Noah, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Anxiety, Bad at Communication, Declan and Ronan fight, Depression, F/M, First Kiss, First Love, First Time, Fluff and Angst, Gaelic lore/Irish mythology - freeform, Henry Cheng’s hair, I swear, Joseph Kavinsky is His Own Warning, Light BDSM, M/M, Panic Attacks, This might actually be more impressive if you AREN'T familiar with Normal People, You do not need to be familiar with Normal People, also pie, breaking up, later Bluesey, no magic just repression, normal people au, oh and Henry Cheng, only sexy berries instead of sexy tea, pining Ronan, pining adam, secret romance, seeing your sort of friend outside of school eat blackberries as part of your bisexual awakening, that's it don't be shy step right in
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:20:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 61,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25837942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheCryingClub/pseuds/TheCryingClub
Summary: Parrish 5:51 PM:Do you ignore texts too?Ronan 6:07 PM:Sorry. I was washing my hairParrish 6:07 PM:For 3 days? Just tell a guy if you don’t feel like talking.Ronan doesn’t know what to reply, because that sounds like something he isn’t equipped to answer. It sounds dangerously close to something he cannot allow himself to believe is happening.So instead he says,I never feel like talking.Parrish 6:10 PM:You seemed to feel like it in the barn.Parrish 9:47 PM:Enlighten me as to your preferred method of communication.Ronan doesn’t know what to say for a full day. He hates staring at this screen, trying to imagine what Adam means. Phones, specifically texting seems like the stupidest way to talk to someone that had ever been invented. Like Morse code would be more effective than this shit. Fucking smoke signals.41 hours later, Ronan gets another beer and answers Adam. He hears Declan’s voice in his head.I wouldn’t advise that.Ronan 3:55 PM:Come over
Relationships: Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Comments: 182
Kudos: 240





	1. Unguibus et rostro

**Author's Note:**

  * For [charactershoes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/charactershoes/gifts).



Persephone sits at their table.

 _Their_ table.

He is still training himself to think of things as theirs, objectively. She told him it would be a long journey—she always says things like a vaguely mystical self-help book. That may not sound enticing, but it is certainly better than the subtractive vitriol his biological parents only ever said to him. He is still retraining his brain to accept that the way they spoke to him, treated him, was objectively _wrong_. Persephone tries to explain, milky hands fluttering like egrets over her knitting, that he shouldn’t look at everything in black and white, even while she is constantly washing away the black from those years. Just seeing her there, absorbing the morning sun like a cat, her hair glowing, chin on knee at _their_ table makes something rise inside of him. While he doesn’t always understand his feelings, he can catalogue how his body reacts to it: Tight chest. Eyes burning, the relief of pooling tears a panacea to the scorch. A sudden choking at the back of his throat that he pushes down because crying is for pussies. That’s one of the black fragments he’s unwillingly gathered and carried with him to this magical, impossible present. Almost as a reminder to be grateful for every damn moment.

This warm, lived-in kitchen with someone who chose Adam as her family juxtaposed the aseptic caseworker’s office, where they had discussed the possibility of changing Adam’s surname. In the end, Persephone said they would think about it. Later, on the floor in the living room, eating Chinese food from cartons sagging with grease, she told him that she thought he might feel, maybe not now, but sometime in the future, that changing his name would be like giving something up to allow her to adopt him. She didn’t want him to give anything up. Not his past. Not what made him who he was.

“I love you as you are, Adam. There is no reason to change anything.”

She said it plainly as she said most things. And he was grateful for her plainness, even with such an extreme declaration, one he’d never heard directed at him save for by his mother once or twice in watery memories, when he’d surprised her by coming up to her side to help her in the kitchen before he could even reach into the sink or after a nightmare. He didn’t know how he would handle it if she’d looked him in the eye, if she had hugged him. Persephone knew all his tells it seemed.

He sensed she understood he wouldn’t want to advertise their situation, his situation to the people he’d gone to school with all his life. Persephone understood a lot of things. Adam was only just beginning to understand that the Greek goddess of vegetation taking him in was kind of poetic and perfect, because every day he awoke to a sun dappled room rather than a water-stained popcorn ceiling that had bowed just a bit too close for his liking. Every day that he awoke in a room nearly as large as the trailer he grew up in, he felt another shoot emerge from the soil. Not just because he had more space or a textured ceiling or even that there was always as much pie as he could possibly consume, it was that he wasn’t afraid to make a sound, he wasn’t afraid to fill a space. He wasn’t afraid to _live_ in this house. It felt like a home.

He’d turned the soil when he left his parents, hoping to start over, and finally, finally it nearly hospitable for growth again. As though reading his mind or his soul, Persephone brought every plant in the house into his room and lined them along the window sills, the top of his dresser—“better light in here”. But again, he figured out what she was doing. She had given him something to grow. Something to care for. A reason to stay. But she had already given him so many.

“Watch out for…a…some kind of reptile today.” She’s staring down into her cup. It’s a sight so familiar to him now, he has to physically pull himself forward, out of the amberized warmth of the moment.

_Such a pussy._

He opens the fridge and pulls out the milk, then takes a glass down from the cabinet.

“Hm.” Her quiet, almost child-like voice rises from behind him. “The leaves also say it would be better if you just drank it straight from the carton.”

He looks at her. She seems to immediately understand his paralysis: it was bad manners; he would have been whooped for it in his other life, though his dad doing it in his underwear each morning was as regular as a clock passing the number three twice a day.

“You’ll save me a glass to wash and you’re the only one who drinks it. It only makes sense.”

He knows what she is doing. And he likes pleasing her, even if it is for his own sake. He drinks from the carton.

“Better than a cup, right?”

He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and screws the cap back on, biting back his smile.

“Why don’t you have a piece of pie before you go?”

“Can’t. ACTs today. I need to get to the library.”

“You can just say you don’t prefer the boysenberry pie.”

“I _love_ the boysenberry pie.”

“You say that about all of them.”

“It’s true about all of them.”

He catches a self-satisfied smile before her curtain of hair blocks his view. “At least take the sandwich in the fridge. I made it yesterday. Didn’t want it after all.”

He opens the fridge to find an immaculate sandwich on superior bread waiting in a Ziploc. She hadn’t made the sandwich for herself. He takes it anyway.

In the car, before he goes in, Adam leans his head against the seat and takes a few deep breaths. He tries to clear his mind of all the vibrating stress of testing, his constant doubting of his new life—tries to rise above his body born of dust. When he feels high from his deep breathing, in through his nose out through his mouth—“picture white light entering you and blowing all of the negative energy out”—he lifts his light head and carefully takes the deck of tarot cards out of his glove compartment.

The image Persephone saw in her leaves is not enough data. He pulls a card. The two of swords. A blindfolded woman holds two swords. The swords are held at equal height, a sort of scales of justice symbol, diplomatically weighing facts. The blindfold indicates what he already knew: he is missing vital information. The swords are the arcana of intellect, of the mind over emotions—this was where he thrived. He would be fine. He’d always been better at putting his mind to work than anything so intangible, so irrelevant as emotions. But the moon overhead indicates intuition. He hated the cards that told him to utilize intuition. He shuffled the cards and drew again. The Nine of Swords. The capacity to be dominated by one’s weaknesses, that which threatened the intellect, emotions, and senseless, thrashing fear.

Once Persephone had pulled the Knight of Swords out of her deck and handed it over to him. “This is your card Adam. Don’t you feel it when you touch it?”

He still doesn’t feel it when he touches it. He tries, but his understanding of tarot is limited to his memorization of the arcana. He uses tarot as more of an organized framework for his thoughts, his plans.

Still a little high from his meditation, he throws the cards back into the glovebox. He does not feel as though he has frameworked shit.

In school, he holds his spine straight, smiles at the right people, blushes down at his shoes when Ms. Neary walks past him in the hall.

At his locker, the conversation of his friends behind him, the sounds of their rough-housing, insulates him.

Tad Carruthers collapses beside him, insouciant in a way Adam would never be, raps his knuckles on the metal doors. “Hey, Parrish.”

“Mornin’.”

“There’s my southern gentleman.”

Adam’s hands freeze in his locker.

He’d let his accept slip, because his mind was still back in the kitchen at home. He felt like he would never stop processing the fact that this life was his. That he had a home, clothes that fit, a car (granted it was Persephone’s, but she let Adam drive it since he’d solved her power steering issue. He’d added fluid. “There’s a fluid for that?” She’d asked dreamily, sweeping by with the linen). That these same kids, once hesitant to accept him into their ranks on the playground, looked to him as their best friend.

It is not that he was trying to live in the past but that he couldn’t forget it, the difference between then and now. The difference in how he feels. He is alive now. And it both relieves and startles him. He constantly fears it will be taken away.

Tad is oblivious to the spook he caused, Adam’s hands useless within the depths of his locker.

“D’you do the essay? I know you did. Don’t hold out on me, Bro—yes! There it is! Gentleman and a scholar, Parrish. You know that? A real catch.”

Tad kisses the paper, declares his undying love for it. The guys laugh. He slaps Adam’s shoulder in what Adam can only assume is an effort to include him in the joke. Despite understanding the reason why, Adam’s body responds for him. Inside him is an insurrection. He closes his eyes. Sometimes the past is closer to the surface than he likes, and no amount of pie or acceptance can eclipse it.

And of course, in this moment, walking down the hallway is the one person with the power to take this all away from him. Adam can pick out the sound of Ronan Lynch’s footfalls. Shoes were the only non-regulated part of their uniform, but Aglionby had never seen Doc Martens before Ronan Lynch had graced its wainscoted halls. Adam did not have to look to know that Ronan’s uniform probably also looked non-regulated.

Adam looks anyway. Ronan’s scrolling through his phone, headphones in, but the ice in his eyes warns others back, as exotic and deadly as a blue coral snake. He threatens everything Adam is learning to let himself have. Because rather than warning Adam away—Adam who never shies from solving a problem, even the riddle of his existence—Ronan Lynch’s colors draw him in, render him immobile.

Ronan Lynch knows his secrets and has never breathed a word. Adam knows he never would. It is partly this unspoken covenant, and partly the camaraderie of silent glances, that give Adam a sense of privacy between them. The tenuous relationship they’d formed outside of school on the afternoons Adam comes by for Persephone feels impervious to the outside world. Adam constantly fears leaning too much on it to protect the deepest, darkest parts of himself.

Ronan glances up from his phone. They lock eyes before he passes by to his locker, four doors over and two doors down.

Looking at Ronan is like looking at art. Adam parcels out his looks because well, logistics—you don’t want to be caught staring at another guy—and also, because looking at Ronan Lynch for too long completely overwhelms him. Adam doesn’t revel, merely observes the fierce, careless angles of his features, or the scar, thin as a chef’s blade cutting through a thick, dark brow, or the hair buzzed down to about an inch all over, or _unguibus et rostro_ , stabbing out of his collar, a self-destructive, living kind of tattoo. Adam has dreams about touching it, though he’s only seen it once.

Last month, he’d been leaning against the door of the Lynch residence, waiting for Persephone, when Ronan had skipped down the stairs, feet as familiar with the creaking wood as his own skin. He’d been shirtless, only in a pair of worn black jeans. He froze when he saw Adam.

“I didn’t know you were here. Sorry.”

He didn’t look sorry. He never looked anything but intense, impassive in class, incendiary when anyone tried to talk to him. It wasn’t until Ronan turned around to retreat up the stairs that Adam found himself flustered as he tracked the tattoo from tops of Ronan’s shoulders down to the indents at his lowermost back, swallowing in a riot of black ink.

Adam couldn’t be sure whether it was these things that made up Ronan’s mythic appearance, or the mythic place to which he was born that overwhelmed him the most about Ronan. The brown and black cattle wandering the farther fields, the uninterrupted green for acres, harking to an older time, ancient lands, the simplicity of a house with a porch, and a dirt drive welcoming you home. Every time he drove to the Lynch property, he could feel his shoulders loosening. His stomach did the opposite in anticipation of seeing Ronan outside of school, of possibly talking to him if Ronan was feeling sociable—though honestly, he’d even just take the staring that made _him_ feel incendiary. Made him feel seen, and vital, and awake.

If being on the Lynch property was like being able to breathe, being alone with Ronan even for those quick moments was like opening a door away from normal life and closing it behind him. To be with this person, whom he knew carried so many of his own secrets, knowing Adam’s and never seeing him differently because of it, was to be weightless.

All of this had sewn together with the secret of his trailer park childhood, so that Ronan became an inextricable part of Adam’s secrets. It was a strange and fearful thing to walk the halls of Aglionby, knowing he shared this hidden part of himself with a person he didn’t know at all. But Ronan was an entirely different species than the rest of them. Part of what drew Adam in is that he had always looked at Adam like this—unflinching, open, _consuming_. Adam doesn’t know why. But he can catalog how his body reacts: a buoyant fluttering low in his stomach, heartbeat so loud he can hear it inside his head, shortness of breath. Damn it. Ronan is Persephone’s prediction— _a snake, not a reptile,_ he revises. Adam refuses to be a mongoose. He slams his locker.

***  
On a middling day, the central Lynch brother was a tempest. Today, he is a level 4 hurricane. It is only a matter of time before the eldest Lynch brother, Declan, blows a gasket. But then, this, too, is a common occurrence on a middling day, so Ronan isn't too worried.

He’s tearing through the house, looking for a book of folktales that had belonged to his father. It is vital right this very moment, because it includes the tale of the Greywaren and Ronan had dreamed about it last night. First, he’d come face to face with the Greywaren, but just like the frustrating paraprosdokian his dreams presented, he couldn’t actually make out the face. All the more unsettling because he could tell, solely by the arched, battle-ready shoulders and impudent turn of the head, that it was definitely himself. Secondly, the Greywaren had been leading him in the dream, in his own house, to his father’s office down a path as well-trod as his path to the kitchen for rowdy meals, his parents’ room when he had nightmares of long-beaked creatures that stood like men, or his own room—his kingdom and sanctuary—full of the knick-knack bric-a-brac of a turbulent mind (Ronan’s being the catch-all for all of his father’s test-driven original creations and forgeries.) The no-faced Greywaren (Ronan) opened the door, barricaded from the inside by a tower of fallen boxes. Even being a god that could weave the fabric of reality with the skein of his dreams, the Greywaren had to force the door with his rangy shoulder. Despite the exact match of their statures, Ronan had felt smaller than his dreamer counterpart. He ducked his head to follow him into the room, like being permitted to join in something that he was clearly too young for.

The room blasted Ronan with the stagnant dusty smell of a space that lay suspended behind a closed door. But the dust and mildew on the window sills were evidence that life, and decay, could never truly be arrested. In the corner, as faithfully and lovingly rendered as in life, was the Louis IV armoire he had always been afraid of for the mirror, which offered a reflection several shades darker than reality. Additional candidates for terrifying features, the ugly man carved at its figurehead and its earthy smelling interior that seemed it could go on and on into uncharted bowels of the house. Even in a dream, he cast his eyes from it, pretended like he couldn’t see.

Ronan followed the folktale boy, dazed to be back in this hallowed space. None of them had set foot in the room since the three of them had moved the wardrobe out of their parents’ bedroom to make room for their mother’s hospital bed. Well, none of them _openly_ entered their father’s office. Ronan knew the exact shape of the _capaill uisce_ water stain on the window sill, caused by the single-pane’s propensity for condensation. He knew the pictures he’d drawn were still held by fingerprinted tape above the desk. He knew that the handle on the right bottom drawer was still loose.

He was startled when the Graywaren stopped, pulling a box from the bottom of a stack near the Louis IV, dropping it with a muted sound on the desk. Ronan kept trying to look at the objects inside the box, but everything was as empty as the Graywaren’s face. And, if there was any doubt that this creature from his father's stories was not Ronan, the dreamer threw the book into Ronan’s chest with a “There it is, Shithead.”

But here it is, the morning after his dream. Now that Ronan has shouldered into the tomb-like office at the back of the house—indeed barricaded by a fallen box tower—he cannot find the box. He looks for the faded blue-green stain on the top from a bleeding marker or Blue Houdini Kool-Aid, the slightly indented corner from the boxes sitting about it. But there are no more dusty boxes, let alone Blue Houdini stained boxes, because Declan made it his holy mission to rid the house of old dusty artifacts. He’d even hired a person to clean the house, Adam Parrish’s guardian, much to Ronan’s infinite mortification and, privately, his elation.

Their house is the cleanest it has ever been. Not that their mom hadn’t taken care of it. But it had never been professionally clean. Often, she’d let the bathroom or their dad’s riotous office go for months in favor of playing with them or cooking all day smorgasbords for four boys, Niall included, because of his insatiable appetite. His dad ate while he did everything. Disappointed, he goes out to feed the animals. When he returns he wakes Matthew up, showers, and gets ready for school. Matthew plonks down the stairs like a man with wooden legs and pours himself into a chair at the kitchen table. His face looks soft and warm.

Ronan throws the plate of food in front of him, and gives him a finger of coffee with his cup of creamer.

“Oooh, coffee,” says Matthew, having no understanding that coffee did not actually taste like hazelnut cream and plastic. Ronan wasn't about to upset the natural order of things.

“Come on, suck it down. Declan is going to want to leave right at 7.”

Ronan already ate, and now he can’t sit still as he watches his brother exclaim his gratitude throughout the entire meal. He needs that book. When Matthew goes to the bathroom, Ronan starts pulling shit out of the bottom kitchen cabinets that go all the way to the back of the island.

Declan appears in the doorway, looking harassed. He can’t stand to be alone in a room with Ronan anymore.

“What have you been looking for all morning? You’re driving me up the wall.”

“He can’t do that without the car.” Matthew appears, hanging from the top of the doorjamb. Ronan knows Declan will inspect the wall later and lecture Matthew about grubby hand prints.

“Yeah, D,” Ronan says and leaves to get his backpack.

This is what they do. They avoid the unspoken fault line at all costs: Declan finding Ronan, half bled out, in St. Agnes only nine months ago. Ronan muttering in his brother’s arms, “It wasn’t like that,” thinking of Ferdiad being carried by Cú Chulainn. He’d just been trying to feel something. As soon as he’d cut, he’d known it was too deep, but feeling the rush, feeling something after three months of nothing had released everything, the nightmare of finding his father’s brain matter in the driveway, their mother’s collapse a few days later, the awful quiet of the house that used to be so noisy. He remembers texting Declan while blood erratically dripped onto the kneeler in hollow taps. He was a boy full of nightmares.

He’d awoken in the hospital, arm bandaged. A metal creature stood erect by the bed, digging its cold talon into Ronan’s good arm. Looking down at the map of blue lines on his inner arm, he felt exposed.

Declan was sitting beside his bed, head in hands.

“Declan,” Ronan had croaked. Voice raw from the crying he’d done in the church.

“Jesus!”

“Nope. Just me.”

“Fuck you,” said Declan, disbelievingly. He was shaking his head, staring down at his hands. “Don’t ever do that to me again.” When he looked up, Ronan’s throat clenched at the sight of his product-free hair and sleepless eyes.

“I wasn’t—”

“I don’t care. Do not ever leave me to have another conversation like that with them.” Even though their mom hadn’t opened her eyes, spoken, moved in almost as many days as his father had been dead.

Ronan hadn’t thought—but of course, that was the problem. He hadn’t been thinking. And he’d almost left Declan with another body to mourn by accident. So he had compromised. He gave Declan what he was looking for instead, a fight to bear his teeth at. Ronan had gotten his tattoo as soon as he’d recovered enough from the hospital that he no longer got dizzy standing up. It worked as soon as Ronan had ducked into the Volvo to go to school the next day. Declan, grinding his teeth—“Ronan, what the fuck!”

Declan still sighed in a very put upon way when he saw Ronan’s tattoo, which was anytime he bothered to be around to take them to school, because it curled almost halfway up the back of his neck. He needs to make sure Declan, and his put upon ways, didn’t get rid of the book.

“Remember that story about the Greywaren?” he asks, and even he can hear the emotion making his voice hoarse. “I dreamed about him showing me where his book was.”

“That’s so meta,” says Matthew, scrolling on his phone.

Declan and Ronan exchange a glance of amused bewilderment, then recall that they are Declan and Ronan. Declan returns his focus to the road, assiduous. Ronan returns his focus to the scenery rushing by his window, moody.

“I didn’t find it,” Ronan says, ripping the band aid off. “You didn’t throw it out, did you?” He almost wants Declan to tell him he’s acting like a child. He needs something to gnaw on.

“No. Headphones, Matthew.”

They both watch, Ronan in nervous anticipation, as Matthew slips his earbuds in with a cursory, “Don’t fight, guys.”

Declan waves his hand in a stately gesture above the center console— _yeah, yeah, carry on_. It’s so close, Ronan could bite it if he wanted. He does.

“Ronan, what the hell.” Declan doesn’t even sound mad. His tone is flat, which makes Ronan worry about what he’s going to say.

Instead, he shrugs. “I’m feral.”

Declan glances at Matthew in the rearview mirror. Satisfied, he says, “I think you should see someone.”

Ronan puts his hand to his chest. “Why, Declan,” he says in a breathy voice of scandal.

“I’m serious. I think it would be good for you.”

“Oh, like you’re not affected by this shit.”

“Does your definition of ‘shit’ entail a—” he hissed this part—“scam-artist father being murdered on the doorstep of his family home and a comatose mother? If it does, then of course I’m fucking affected by it. Jesus Christ.”

“You don’t act like it.” He’s never there. Ronan wonders how he could feel the loss of their idyllic childhood, if he never even saw his brothers, his home.

“Would it be better if I went around fighting with anything that had a social security number and bleeding out in a church?” Declan’s face drains of all color.

“Stop the car.”

“Ronan—”

“Stop the fucking car."

Declan gingerly pulls over.

“Oh, are we getting apple pies?” Matthew pipes from the back, ostensibly referring to the McDonald’s, golden arches merrily beckoning.

“Fuck you,” says Ronan into the car with as much vitriol as he can muster before slamming the door. Matthew rolls down the window.

“See you later,” Ronan tells him.

As Declan drives away and Ronan starts walking, he hears Matthew whining, “I told you guys not to fight.”

In Latin, Ronan pushes his exam to the side. He thinks Adam sees it. It’s only fair because he saw Adam’s. It’s kind of impossible not to when you spend all your time staring at the boy in front of you. Well, 99% of the time, because now he is staring out the window, thinking about the dream. Is it possible his dad would come to him in dreams? Do the dead ever come back? Ronan has not dreamed of his father once since he died, and wished for it has hard as he’d ever wished for anything in his life.

“Ronan Lynch.”

He looks at Mr. Whelk, the Latin professor.

“Something more interesting out there than in here?”

Ronan says nothing, but Whelk rarely misses an opportunity to wave his dick around.

“You’re not learning if you’re staring out the window, are you?”

“I have nothing to learn from you,” Ronan says, because he’s an opportunist, and he’s not one to pass up an opportunity to piss off Declan.

“Principal’s office.”

“Maybe.” Ronan stands, slowly putting on his dad’s old leather jacket, pointedly ignoring the looks of his classmates. “Or maybe I’ll just head home. Later, Losers.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Whelk. He’s a psycho to everyone.”

“Do you want to follow, Carruthers?”

He still hasn’t changed out of his uniform when Adam shows up to pick up Persephone. He considers feeling self-conscious about it as he lets Adam in, but instead, walks back into the kitchen, jumps on the island, and digs into his ice cream with more fervor.

Persephone puts a roast in the oven that Ronan knows will make the entire house smell like his childhood. Adam comes into the kitchen, deliberately looking past Ronan.

“Ronan told me you got your Latin exam today. Says you did well.”

“Did he?” Adam glances at him.

“He did.” Persephone’s voice is light, unaware of the spar Adam was about to start.

“Ronan did well too.”

Ronan looks up at him, pulling the spoon slowly from his mouth. Adam glances away. Persephone clinks plates behind Ronan as she puts them away.

“Can we go?”

Ronan is used to people not wanting to be around him. He suspects Adam’s reasoning is because he and Niall had found Adam after the last time his piece of shit dad beat him up. That was almost five years ago and Adam is a completely different person now. Taller, stronger, calmer. Ronan is a different person too. Taller, meaner, shittier.

“I’m almost finished,” says Persephone serenely. She walks out past Adam, her mass of white hair following like an entirely separate person. Adam feels a pang of love, a stab of embarrassment.

He stays, tracing the loose, disreputable circle of Ronan’s uniform tie with his eyes. He was used to figuring things out. Problems. People. But Ronan wouldn’t let his wings be spread and pinned for Adam’s observation.

Just as Adam realizes how long he has been staring at Ronan’s mouth, Ronan holds up his ice cream in offering.

“No. No, thank you.” Adam clears his throat. “Did you get back calculus too?”

“Why? You want to measure dicks?” Adam blushes. Ronan feels conciliatory. “I got a B. Well, almost a B. What about you?” Grades are safe to discuss with Adam Parrish.

“A.”

“You’re smarter than me.”

“That’s not true.”

“You’re top of the class.”

“You’d have the highest grade in Latin if it weren’t for your shit grammar.”

“Hey, I work really hard at my shit grammar, man.” Ronan almost drops the spoon in the empty container, but realizes he doesn’t want his hands empty for what he’s about to say. “You wanna tutor me, Parrish?”

It sounds suggestive. Adam wonders if he is dirty-minded for hearing it like that, for his body getting hot in response. He rubs the back of his neck, swallows. “I don’t think you need me.”

“Sure I do,” Ronan grates. His voice transforms to Declan’s stern, polished tone, “I have a problem with focus and applying myself.”

Adam drops his arm, laughs. Ronan would get kicked out of Latin a thousand times for that laugh, for this conversation.

Persephone appears behind Adam. Ronan knows that the house will be quiet again when they go, until Matthew gets home with Declan to fill it up.

“Later, Lynch,” Adam says.

Ronan says nothing.

***

"Did I give you enough time?” Persephone asks, one hand on top of the other on top of her butterfly purse in the passenger seat.

“What? What do you mean?” Adam feels caught.

“To chat with Ronan.”

“Ronan doesn’t…chat.”

“Hmm…he does seem to be more expressive physically than verbally.”

Adam says nothing.

“He’s actually a very sensitive person.”

Adam remembers Ronan, younger, more guileless, watching him with lines in his forehead and tears in his eyes. Adam’s locks up, and he doesn’t say another word for the rest of the drive home.


	2. Hunger and Itch

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains some of my favorite scenes. Hope you enjoy.

When Declan and Matthew get home, Ronan is waiting for them to eat. He already has the plates and silverware, empty cups waiting for milk, on the table.

“Candy knows my name,” says Matthew reverently as he drops into a chair at the table. It’s the first time Ronan has seen him without a phone attached to his hand in weeks. He waits, wary.

“That’s still used as a name?” Declan says absently, pouring a drink. He looks at Ronan, suddenly suspicious. “You cooked?”

The amber drink is the one thing he doesn’t negotiate for more expensive, more boring options; it’s the same spicy vanilla whiskey their dad drank. It’s such a credit to his character, to his grief, that Ronan takes mercy and decides not to ruffle Declan’s starched collar with the truth. “Persephone.”

“Thank God.”

“Oh, sure,” Matthew answers Declan, reaching for the colcannon Ronan did actually make.

He’d stayed in the kitchen after Adam and Persephone left. As the steam of the boiling water billowed, he remembered Adam’s direct gaze and white sleeves rolled up against summer skin. His pink cheeks and gusting breath of a laugh, as though Ronan had unexpectedly teased it out.

“Her name is actually Victoria. Is that fancy enough for you?”

Ronan and Declan exchange a look. Only Matthew could comprehend how his classmate’s parents could extrapolate such a nickname from a queen’s name.

After taking a bite, Declan looks at the colcannon suspiciously.

Ronan tactically intercepts, “How was work?”

“Don’t be a shit, Ronan.”

“Oh my god, Ronan, it’s just like Mom’s.” This is Matthew, oblivious to the tightening air of the room. Or perhaps, especially attuned to it.

Ronan looks at Declan, knows he remembers showing Ronan how to make the potatoes that Easter, when Ronan returned from the hospital. With the middle Lynch son scarred and cowed, if only temporarily, the father himself in the cold, hard ground behind St. Agnes, and their mother’s bed beeping like a metronome from the master bedroom above, Declan decided they would maintain some tradition.

“Got my grades back.”

“Are you going to tell me anything that surprises me?”

“I got a C+ in calculus.”

“You actually applied yourself, Ronan,” he says. “Brava.”

“A in Latin.” Ronan sardonically relishes Declan’s actual surprise, his pride.

“I call her Candy because she always smells sweet,” Matthew explains. “It drives me crazy.”

Declan grins crookedly down at his food. Ronan puffs out a laugh.

“She’s like my Adam. Know what I mean, pal?” Matthew knocks Ronan’s elbow which has gone still.

“What is he talking about?” asks Declan, weighing each bite on his fork, just like Dad used to, before shoveling the food into his mouth. If Declan knows Ronan, and as much as Ronan hates to admit it, he fucking does, he knows that if he asks this _and_ looks at his brother, Ronan will flip the table. Declan keeps his eyes down. Ronan does not flip the table.

Enough silence has passed that Ronan thinks the matter is dropped.

“Can I take this into my room? I have a campaign.” Matthew is halfway out of his chair, milk on his upper lip, juggling his plate and second cup of milk, oblivious to the chaos he has wrought. Or perhaps, especially attuned to it.

“No,” Declan and Ronan chime. Each have their reasons for not letting the youngest of their brood stray from the herd.

***

That night, Adam stays up until midnight, completing all of his homework. He wishes he could say it was only the homework that kept him up.

He wanders to the kitchen to cut some boysenberry pie. He savors it so fully, he makes a noise of satisfaction, alone in the middle of the night, chipped tile cold underfoot.

Who would he have been if Persephone hadn’t stepped in? Who would he have been if Niall Lynch hadn’t picked him up from the fields behind his trailer park, for that matter? Why does Ronan Lynch have to be part of his reclamation story?

The next day at school, Ronan sits at a table to himself. He has expensive headphones on today, noise-cancelling. His chair is back on two legs, and Ronan’s boots are crossed on the table, tempting one of the lunch workers or professors to come harass him. He does everything without a single concern for how it looks. He is exactly the right amount of confident Adam wishes he could just be without having to train himself to it like Pavlov’s dogs. Ring the bell: stand taller. Ring the bell: twist the cuff to hide the fraying. Ring the bell: speak clearer, enunciate, truncate words and sentences, don’t let the drawl show.

Ronan is eating French fries with an obscene amount of ketchup. Adam has noticed his weird eating habits, that he never gets a full lunch, just snacks. But he’s eating all the time.

“Enjoying your music there, Lynch?” Tad asks. The only time Tad would say anything provoking was when Ronan couldn’t hear—or was pretending not to hear them. Adam could never be sure.

A glob of ketchup falls off a fry just before he puts it into his mouth and rolls lazily down his shirt.

“Motherfuck,” Ronan mutters to himself as Tad continues jeering,

“You’ve got a little something. Yeah—yep, there you go”—as Ronan swipes his finger under it and licks it off without a care. He glances over to see Adam watching. The guys laugh as everything darkens down to Ronan’s eyes on him. Ronan was the only person who made him feel dangerously close to the real person he was hiding underneath the soccer, the popularity, the grades. That is to say, himself. Scared. Fragile. _Hungry_.

Persephone feeds him better than he has ever eaten, and he repays her by constantly feeling starved.

***

Ronan hears it as soon as he opens his eyes. The song their mom used to sing to them. It’s down the hall from him, so he can only make out the swells and dips, the melody, rather than the actual voice, but there’s only one person who could be singing it.

It brings a hundred memories rushing in that he wants to hurl against the wall and shatter. Memories that he wants to hide in a shoe box with soft padding. Ronan stumbles down the hall, pulling a T-shirt over his head. Matthew’s singing continues, a nearly perfect replication of their Ma’s slower, quieter rendition of the famous song.

He leans against the wall outside of their parents’ bedroom door. He does not know why he still thinks of it as being their parents’ bedroom rather than just his mother’s. Niall Lynch will never sleep in it again.

Ronan knows what he will see if he looks around the corner of the doorway—something he can’t bring himself to do, something for which Declan doesn’t have the time or patience: Matthew sitting at their mother’s bedside. Maybe he’s laying his head in his arms on the side of the bed, his arm running alongside hers. Their blonde hair will both bear the same crinkly curl to the right of their twin widow’s peaks. Instead of mourning their dead father, Matthew mourns their sleeping mother.

Matthew is too young to be monitoring their mother’s pain meds. But he looks forward to these stolen moments at her bedside with devotion, pleased to be with her in any way. Ronan couldn’t look around the corner for guilt at intruding on something private, something that was Matthew’s alone. They’d had years with Dad. Mattie had always been passed up in favor of Ronan or Declan for being too young. So, their mother, ever the diplomatic parent, took Matthew as her favorite. It was odd that once, they were all a single unit, and now, invisible barriers divided the remaining Lynches.

The fact that Aurora could still look like their mother on nothing but a liquid diet, fed by machines for months, was miraculous. It is an unspoken question that hangs over the threshold of every room like an upside down horseshoe whether Aurora Lynch will ever be the same if she does wake up. It is worse, somehow, than watching their larger than life father explode in a shower of sparks. Matthew should not have to watch his mother, once a comet, burn out and fade. None of them should. But that’s what they do, what they have done, every day for nine months. No wonder Declan is always away.

Ronan felt if he could just find the Greywaren book, he could help her. There had to be something Dad had left in all these books of folklore, in all the stories he told, some code. He wouldn’t take their mother from them too; he would have ensured some clever plan, a contingency that kept her here with them while he took his final, dramatic bow.

Ronan takes his aching chest and aching head to his father’s office. He had cleared the boxes away from the door the other day and oiled the hinges so that he could slip in and out undetected. He sits in the 1960s Johnson chair, ready to pay his own penance, to join Matthew in his hurting. He stares down at the scars on his arm, gradually thicker and glossier as his numbness grew until it encapsulated everything, until he couldn’t see or hear anyone. The last one, the deepest that had sent him to the hospital had, ironically, brought all sound and feeling rushing back to him. So he is done with that. He still looks for other ways to feed the fire constantly eating him alive. To scratch the relentless itch under his skin.

He runs his hands under the edge of Dad’s desk, savoring the angle of the bevel, lovingly sanded by his father in forward and backward strokes, smoothed with rags stained with linseed. He presses his thumb along the joint where it would have been harder to fully seal. The scent of the residual oil takes him right back to one of the long barns, sunlight cutting in through the dust and dander. He’s seven or eight, sitting with Niall.

“You know, part of the art of reproduction is not only in the wood grain, and the fitting together—anyone can dowel wood together without forcing the matter with nails, if they’ve got enough sense,” he growled, spitting amber liquid into a crackling polyethylene bottle. “It’s about—well, what do you think it’s about?”

Ronan looked at the Chippendale for a long time, frantically flipping through the catalog of everything he’d ever heard his father say about his work, his forgeries, and was so flustered, the catalog showed all empty cards.

“Maybe the history of the piece, hey? Just like you have a history, a life—” Niall reached out and nudged Ronan’s cheek with his knuckle. “It’s very important that a piece has time to live in a home and absorb life too, state of equilibrium and all that. Like letting a new bottle of red breathe—aye,” his dad said coyly, “but you’re too young for that, arent’ya?”

Ronan grinned wide, showing all of his teeth, because he had no idea what Niall was talking about, but he didn’t want to nod—‘yes, Da, I’m too young for that.’ He just wanted to stay there, with his father talking to him in the indulgent way he had when he drank his spice-scented liquor. A man who seemed to love and understand everything.

“Look at the birds, Ronan. Do you see them? The beak, here, it tells the story of the chair’s parentage. Where it comes from. This hook-nosed bastard hails from this country’s birthplace.”

God, he misses his Dad’s voice. He wishes he could go back with everything he knows now, everything he understands. He wants to, again, listen to his father speak and give him answers that will impress him. He knows his dad didn’t mind; Ronan had been his shadow for so long, Niall had gotten in the habit of explaining everything he was doing, just to include him. Sitting here cannot remove the sting of wanting something he can never have, so he leaves his father’s office, shutting the door behind him. Matthew’s voice follows his thudding boots out of the house.

There is another place, a more sacred place he cannot enter. The long barn from his memory—where his father’s outside office peaceably sat, waiting for a Lynch to come and take his rightful place behind the saw and hammer. Every day, Ronan walks by the long barn with the makeshift door, swollen in the frame—there had always been doors stuck closed where Niall Lynch had been—the overflowing metal trash can of crumpled Coca-Colas, the tack board just as Da left it, with the folk band flier and vintage print of three boys running off a pier. Niall used to say it was Ronan and his brothers, and though they knew it was impossible, though he knew his father was spinning a story into existence of something that never happened, he still devoured it, forever insatiable for his father’s immortal stories.

Instead, he goes to the plum tree beside the barn. They’re not in season, but he trails his fingers through the tree, as though searching for a good fruit. A sound draws him to the base of the tree. Crouching down, his eyes search the undergrowth and fallen leaves. A round tuft of black hair seems to be emitting the wild cry. Ronan thinks that maybe one of the barn cats had kittens, but then he sees the black eye open, the small beak.

Of course Declan’s being a shit about it.

“You can’t have that thing inside. You’ll get Matthew sick, or Mom—” and Ronan can tell it hurts him to even say it. The fact that he never mentions their father is expected for Declan the Repressed, but not mentioning their parent still living in the room upstairs takes dedication. “Is it so hard to think about someone other than yourself?”

Ronan wants to say, ‘if I leave her outside, she’ll die.’ He almost reassures that he’ll be careful. She’ll never leave his room. He does not assure Declan, nor ever would, ‘I do think of other people. It’s me I could give less than a shit about.’ What he says, instead, is a sentence sharpened to a point and aimed to maim. “Dad would have let me keep it.”

The leather covered wheel of the Volvo creaks beneath Declan’s strangling grip. Rain patters the pristine windshield, now shimmering with refracted points of light. Matthew had long ago put on his literal and figurative headphones.

“Oh, right. You only saw the side of Dad that was careful of your feelings. I was the one who got to watch him put the horse with the bad hoof that got gangrene while he was gone out of its misery. And when I cried, you know what he told me? ‘One day, you’ll learn this is a mercy, boy.’ ”

Ronan cannot stand the way Declan’s voice twists into a sickening facsimile of their father’s. He crosses his arms tight over his chest, slumps impossibly further in the leather seat, stabs his knees into the glove box.

“Not like you’re ever around either, man. I don’t know what fucking high horse you rode into town on.”

“I have to fulfill orders, Ronan, you know that. Dad had them backlogged for years, promised pieces we don’t have. It's purely our bad luck running out that no one else has come to our door.”

Ronan says nothing

“Besides, I thought you idolized dad for being gone all the time.”

At the stoplight, Ronan gets out.

“Stop being a child, Ronan,” Declan says in his firm politician’s voice. He sneers, inconvenienced, at the rain spotting the sleeve of his Tom Ford. “You're going to get sick.”

“You get sick from viruses, asshole.” He slams the door and opens it just to slam it again. Declan lets off the brake so that the Volvo delicately leaps to get away from Ronan’s abuse.

Declan does not try to persuade him to get back in, but Ronan doesn’t expect that and wouldn’t have any way. He stalks to school in the rain, trying to shake off the itch he’s been feeling under his skin for months.

Living out in the country, Ronan had been bitten by more than one spider. One time in particular, he’d gotten a couple of especially nasty bites that had hardened the surrounding flesh. Where the skin stretched to accommodate the venom’s effect, it itched like crazy. Matthew and Declan could be persuaded not to scratch, but Ronan did not have that kind of self-control. He’d scratched until one of his bites had opened and become infected. “Why would you do that to yourself, Son?” Niall had asked, clearly pained he hadn’t been able to protect Ronan from his own urges.

This itch was like that, only there was no focal point to chase it back to and scratch until he bled. His brother had taken away all the other ways he had to appease that incessant itching: the driving of his father’s car, the drinking—at least when Dec was around—and the cutting. He still remembers the horrified look on Declan’s face as he carried Ronan in his arms. Etched in the similar helpless misery his father’s had been about the infected bite.

When he enters Latin, Whelk stops mid-sentence. “Class begins at seven forty, Ronan.”

“Yeah, no shit.”

“Trying to impress your classmates with that language?”

When Ronan Lynch is already bucking in a China shop, he wants to make sure he kicks out the windows too, for good measure. “Can you just give me the fucking detention and move on?”

The class relays a juvenile chorus of ‘ooooh’. Ronan drops into his seat, feeling cold and tired from his walk. Exhausted from evading his grief this morning.

***

They’re on their way to World Hist with Professor Dean Allen when Tad’s elbow digs between Adam’s ribs. Adam jerks away before he can school his reaction. Tad pays him a look that stacks up with other looks and makes Adam wonder if Tad has some idea of his past.

“So, after the game Friday, we’re having a party back at mine—Dad’s out of town for a work trip, if you catch my drift. You down?”

Adam doesn’t abide the way Tad casually mentions his father’s potential affair. He realizes the problem; Tad’s reaction feels too disconnected from reality. For Adam, who has had his cheekbone pressed into the dirt at the bottom of his trailer’s stairs, each grain imprinting on his skin, he cannot be disconnected from anything. When he feels this stark difference between himself and his friends, he errs on the side of caution.

“Sure. I’ll be there.”

Ronan is already outside the classroom. Back in Latin, Adam thought he looked exhausted. Now, the question weighs on the tip of his tongue: _Are you okay?_ But he is paralyzed. He knows he cannot ask that here, in the jungle of Aglionby. In Ronan’s kitchen, they would be safe, sequestered from the outside world. Here, their strange rapport was on display for gross misinterpretation. Yet another potentiality Adam could not abide.

“Looking a little like a drowned rat, Lynch.”

Adam’s shoulders creep upward, memories of provocative comments from his father, just angling for a reaction, an excuse.

“Or pit bull,” Eric adds.

Adam tightens his grip on his bag’s strap.

Ronan doesn’t even look at them. “Rain is wet, Genius,” he says without inflection.

“You strip off in the toilet again to dry off?”

Adam feels every bit of his body go alert, like when he’d happen by a room at a party and hear someone fooling around inside—a purely physical reaction he could not control. Had Ronan taken off his shirt yesterday after spilling ketchup on himself? It shouldn’t matter. But it did. Adam needed to know so that he could, in future, use the bathroom on the second floor instead.

“Should I’ve sent you an invitation?” Ronan’s insinuating tone makes it worse. Adam can’t stop staring at the barbs of Ronan’s tattoo coming out of his collar as he peeks down into his backpack.

An animal sound escapes said backpack, interrupting business as usual in the hallway. Ronan reaches inside.

“Is that a fuckin’ bird, Lynch?” asks Tad, incredulous.

“What the hell?” Eric laughs. “He’s going to give us bird flu!”

All of a sudden, Adam feels like his friends are a troop of monkeys. He watches Tad’s face twist from mockery to something else. “The shit you get away with because your parents are dead.”

Ronan carefully sets his backpack down. Then, he lunges. Professor Allen, who had been coming down the hall, catches Ronan around his middle. Even though Lynch had been about to thrash his friend, Adam decidedly does not like the professor touching Ronan like that.

“You don’t want to do that, Mr. Lynch,” Allen tells him, still struggling to hold him.

“Don’t ever talk about my family again,” Ronan threatens.

“Last warning, Ronan,” the professor tells him.

Adam herds his friends away. For some reason, he cannot look at Ronan. He thinks he should feel bad for not saying anything. But silence has been his mode of survival for as far back as his earliest memories. Silence, observation, and mimicry. He’d forged his current friends that way.

As he is leaving for practice, he checks his back and finds an insouciant Ronan Lynch leaning against the wall, head tilted back, watching him. Adam keeps walking to the doors, turns back at the last moment.

He walks to Ronan. “You okay?”

“Other than my brother being a shitlord and Carruthers being the king of all douches, dandy. Why do you ask?”

“Something to do with that look on your face.” Adam smiles, and Ronan looks surprised by it. Does he truly smile so infrequently? That he frightens the native fauna with his bared teeth?

“I have practice now, but you could come. I could give you a ride home after?”

Ronan shakes his head, smiles his shark’s smile. “Detention.”

His friends are the reason for this, but he knows Ronan can fight his own battles. “You shouldn’t let to them get to you like that,” he says anyway.

“You can act like we’re friends all you want, Parrish, but you’re not that kind of person.” Ronan walks down the hall, away from him.

Adam tries not to take it personally. “I’m not acting like anything.” He follows. “Maybe I am that kind of person.” The problem is, Adam doesn’t know. He hates that Ronan can see this.

“Yeah, right, Parrish. Your posse is probably waiting to jump you for lowering yourself to speak to me. Your girlfriend too.” Ronan looks away, down the hall, practiced disinterest edging the derisive tension of his mouth.

“What?” What would his hypothetical girlfriend—never mind that she does not exist—have to do with this? With him talking to Ronan?

“You blush anytime Rachel talks to you.”

Adam silently gauges him. Ronan doesn’t move or back down.

“You blush at fucking everything, Parrish.”

“You know, that statement renders your first point moot.” Adam can hear his accent leak out, but he can’t bring himself to care because he knows he’s right.

Ronan raises a belligerent eyebrow; he knows Adam is right too.

Adam thinks about crowding Ronan against the wall, about wrapping Ronan’s tie around his hand and pulling to press their chests together.

“You’re blushing right now.”

“I’m aware.”

Ronan looks away. “I don’t want to fight with you, Parrish.”

“We’re not fightin’.” But Adam does feel a little whiplashed by the conversation. He can’t figure out what Ronan is angling for.

“Good luck at your game tomorrow.”

“Thanks.” At the door, he turns back once more. “Yeehaw.”

Ronan bites his lip, shaking his head to himself.

Adam steps out into the autumn afternoon, grinning. He plays well that afternoon.

All afternoon, the skies were gray and scattered with fat clouds. It’s pouring outside now. He and Persephone are sitting in the living room. He’s drinking coffee, a habit leftover from his old life and working three merciless jobs. He still couldn’t believe this was his life now. Drinking coffee just because he liked it, for a little boost to stay up and finish his homework, a boost that permitted him this small moment of guilt-free idleness. Persephone, feet up in the chair, hair falling around her, is drinking some spice-scented tea—Earl Grey maybe. She stares into her cup. He wonders if she’s reading leaves. He marvels that they could both be enjoying this—the company, the silence, the rain. Sometimes he wondered if Persephone had just emerged fully formed from the ground one day, wildflowers in her impossibly long hair, just to find him. It was stupid.

Right now, her cheeks are pink from the tea. Come to think of it, she may have added a splash of bourbon to her cup.

“Why aren’t you out with your friends?” She knows Tad had asked him over. They’d been eating dinner when he got the text.

“Don’t feel like it. I'd rather be where it’s quiet, where I can think.”

“I am so happy you’re here, Adam.”

He is startled by the emotion caught in his throat. He cannot say anything but instead gives her a crooked smile to show he felt the same.

He doesn’t want to leave Persephone or the person he has become at Aglionby behind, but his test scores, his extracurriculars are opening doors for him. He could leave and never look back, because he cannot keep being the boy with his past just a few streets over and down the potholed dirt drive. If he was hungry, then he learned it from his biological parents, from that place. He feels sorry for them and that feels wrong. They don’t deserve his pity. Even though they never wanted him, it still hurts to abandon anyone who knew this same hunger.


	3. Fuel to Fire

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay so...I have a playlist for this fic that I have been listening to almost exclusively for 2 months while working on this. I've taken some songs from Maggie's CDtH playlist and from Normal People, the songs that really fit the mood of this fic. I'm pretty damn happy with it. Is this a thing any other human beings would be interested in?
> 
> Btw, this is THAT chapter. The one with the berries.

He walks up the wide stairs to the front door. Money would buy him the freedom to do anything he wants. This is what the Lynch house is to him, a symbol of freedom, of the opportunity to separate himself from his first life. It represents not something unattainable but possibility—no. Inevitability.

He knocks, but no one answers. He lets himself in, walks through to the kitchen to let Persephone know he’s waiting. He is hooked by what he sees out of the open back door. Ronan Lynch viciously hitting a punching bag. It takes a moment for Adam to correctly translate the sound of each hit as something outside of himself rather than knuckle on bone. His skin, muscle, and bone, specifically. He will not allow his body to flinch, but his vision unfocuses for a moment. Ronan grew up so steeped in love that his household was a place where fists could be thrown for sport, where a father encouraged his boys to hone their skill, never bearing the undertone of savagery for the sake of something as base as instinct. There is no civilized cage for the rage Adam was born with in his blood.

Ronan stops, chest heaving, and stares out over the back fields for a long time. Adam thinks the other guys from school pick at him because he’s beautiful, so completely otherworldly that he’s untouchable. People cannot stand when someone is untouchable.

He steps out of Adam’s view and walks back slowly, contemplatively, with a beer in his hand. Adam wonders where his older brother is. He heard that after Niall Lynch died and Aurora Lynch was felled by a broken heart, the eldest Lynch son, Declan, took guardianship over his brothers. It is only right then that Adam realizes Ronan is an orphan too. They were two sides of the same coin, but there it was. Something they shared.

He lets himself stare a little longer at Ronan’s tattoo, his hand—clenching, unclenching, the curve of his bicep, the bulging deltoid as he pulls from the bottle before throwing it out into the fields. Then he turns away, startled by the images in his head.

He finds Persephone as she comes out of the hallway, holding a laundry basket.

“Oh. Hello, Adam,” she says, unhurried.

“Hey.”

“Ronan’s out back I think.”

“I saw him.”

She raises her eyebrows and purses her lips. He knows she’s holding back a smile. Adam asks her where the bathroom is.

On the way, his feet stop moving when he sees a picture of Aurora Lynch laughing, head thrown back, mouth open wide, unafraid of being loud. She’s slapping at Niall, who reaches for her, undeterred, the mischievous eyes of a bawdy, self-satisfied joke, mouth shaped like he’d just finishing saying the family name. The expression is so familiar to Adam, who is very good at watching without being watched, he has to catch his breath. That exact curl of the upper lip, baring of perfect teeth, was Ronan’s killing blow.

Adam couldn’t put it into words, but this picture made him want. So badly. What Ronan and his brothers had with these two gods for parents or what they themselves had between them. It didn’t matter. Neither of these things fit into his plan.

When he finishes in the bathroom, he walks further down the hallway in search of more pictures. Instead, he finds a room with the door open. All of the windows in the bedroom are open. A hospital bed beeping. A woman on the bed, flaxen hair spread out around her, sunlight gilding it into a halo from an early renaissance painting. Adam knows this must be Aurora now. Was this worse for the Lynch brothers?

When he comes back down, he finds Ronan, but with more clothing, in the kitchen—sleeveless muscle shirt, torn black jeans. He’s sitting on the counter, facing the door, almost as though he is waiting for Adam. 

He is momentarily caught by the sight of Ronan’s tilted head before he sees Adam. He bites a blackberry, still on the stem, and chews it slowly, with the familiarity of someone who has done it a thousand times. He glances up from under his brow and lifts his head when he sees Adam. Black juice rolls down his chin and Adam’s eyes follow it like a predator tracking a rabbit. Ronan wipes it away with the back of his wrist.

“Do you ever just...eat a meal? A real meal?” asks Adam without thinking. He is still off kilter from seeing the picture of Aurora and the woman herself in the bed, suspended.

“That concerned about my eating habits, Parrish?”

Adam puts his hands in his pockets, looks anywhere but at Ronan and regrets saying anything.

Ronan jumps off the counter. Adam watches his feet appear right in front of his Converse. For some reason, Adam is made self-conscious by the sight of Ronan’s bare feet, the elegant bones and long toes.

“Hey,” says Ronan.

Adam looks up.

Ronan offers a blackberry, no stem. Ronan is holding it close enough that he could open his mouth for Ronan to put it inside. Or he could take it from his hand. Adam opens his mouth. Ronan takes a breath through his nose and Adam wonders if he’s made a gross miscalculation. But when he chances a look at Ronan, his mouth is parted, his gaze very focused on Adam's mouth and he feels the visceral truth brushing against every nerve down his body that Ronan is not offended or disgusted.

“They’re really sweet,” Ronan explains, almost apologetic.

Adam nods, chewing. He wishes he knew how other people act behind closed doors, so he could emulate that behavior. But then, Ronan isn’t the same as other people. And Adam does not feel the same as other people when they’re together.

After that, everything is the same at school, which is good. But it makes Adam hungry for more of what they are with the door shut behind them.

When Adam pulls onto the Lynch property, he finds the BMW’s hood up and Ronan watching Youtube videos in the vicinity of the open hood, ostensibly trying to diagnose it.

It does not escape Ronan’s attention that Adam is early, by almost an hour. Persephone will still be elbow deep in the oven with yellow gloves that nearly go all the way to her shoulders. Ronan knows because he could set the grandfather clock in the hallway to her cleaning routine. If he wanted to keep time for a reel, he would be able to use her thwacking of the Oriental rug from the living room. Come to think of it, he isn’t sure how she gets that rug outside to the banister by herself. He would have to offer to help when she did it next month.

Though something calms the itch at the thought that Adam possibly arrived early to see him, he can’t shake the image of Adam standing in the hallway with his hands in his pockets, coolly assessing his mother. It makes him feel a little weird. But he knows Adam processes everything like this. Ronan feels weird, too, about feeding Adam the berries. He had expected him to take them, not to fucking…Ronan presses his hip into the Beemer’s unforgiving body, accepting the sharp fleeting pain. No, Ronan doesn’t feel weird about it. He liked it. But that’s why he felt so exposed. It felt like a very Adam Parrish thing to do, to draw out the meaning by experimentation and observation.

“Hey,” Adam says, elbowing Ronan’s elbow.

Ronan grunts a reply.

“Is it yours?”

“Yeah. It was Dad’s.”

“I never see you drive it to school.” He runs his hand along the clean engine block. For the car being nearly 35 years old, it was like new under the hood, and Adam Parrish, friend to cars everywhere, appreciated such care.

“Is this a real conversation, Parrish?”

“Just talking with ya. Damn,” he says amiably. Perhaps it has to do with the E24 under his hands. “What’s wrong with it?” But he is already looking for the problem.

“It won’t start.”

“Does it click?”

“Does absolutely jack shit. Was working fine last week.”

Adam reaches in and fixes a loose fuse. “Try it now.”

Ronan does. It roars to life. Ronan’s smile through the windshield at Adam is electric. Feeling giddy with utility, for loosening the dark line of Ronan’s brow, Adam reaches in to extract a dead leaf wedged next to the head. He gouges his knuckle in the tight spot. When Ronan comes around, Adam is examining his hand.

“What happened?”

Adam gestures vaguely to the car. He is too embarrassed to say. Robert Parrish would have backhanded him, called him a fuckin’ moron.

“Let me see.”

“It's fine.”

“Let me look at it, Parrish. You're not getting tetanus from my fucking Beemer.”

Rolling his eyes, Adam gives him his hand. When their hands meet, he jumps a little as though Ronan has shocked him. Ronan knows his touch is delicate though. It’s only a minor graze, but still.

They both know he is holding Adam’s hand, looking at it, longer than strictly necessary. Maybe Ronan is performing his own experiments.

“Come on. I have some shit inside. And wipe that dopey look off your face, like your poverty ass has never seen a classic car.”

It should have stung. But instead, it reminds them both that Ronan is the only person that really knows him, and it isn’t a big deal.

“I can’t help it,” Adam says, his smile cutting deeper into his cheeks.

Ronan huffs, color high on his neck and cheeks, lightly shoulder-checking Adam on the way in. “Well, it makes you look like a loser.”

After Ronan cleans his cut with an alcohol pad—which Adam would have been fully capable of doing himself—and put a Spiderman Band-Aid over it—which Adam would have also been fully capable of doing himself and also, definitely would not have—Ronan asks if Adam wants to see something cool.

“Sure.” Adam still feels fuzzy around the edges. He thinks it might be contentment, either from the BMW or Ronan’s intent focus on his injury in the bathroom, the barest whisper of touch from a boy with raw knuckles and scarred arms, he can’t be sure. Adam is no longer sure of anything.

Ronan leads him out of the house, jaunting down the front steps with the easy care of someone who grew up in the dream of this place. Adam can barely keep his head on his neck. “It really is like a farm.”

“It is a goddamn farm, Parrish.”

“Must be nice.”

“You being shitty?”

Adam doesn’t know what he’s being, so he doesn’t say anything.

Of all the barns dotting the fields, Adam is surprised when they enter the oldest looking one, constructed of brown, water-stained wood. Inside the light comes through the roof in shafts, dust motes reminiscent of underwater exploration. Come to think of it, the inside of the barn does feel a bit like the quiet, undisturbed remains of the Titanic.

Adam can smell livestock as soon as they pass under the open doorway, but he is drawn by the closed door immediately in view, the array of saws beside it and the boneyard of unfinished wood pieces. The things housed in this barn are suspended, just like the woman upstairs.

He strays from Ronan’s lead to the assembly line of dusty saws. “What is it called?”

Ronan turns to find Adam examining the machinery.

“Scroll saw. For cutting furniture, like, the joints and…decorative shit.”

“Do you know how?”

“I know a little. Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to show you.”

He follows Ronan who steps over what possibly used to be a bale of hay, but now was just a picked-apart pile.

“There’s this cow that’s been depressed ever since…” he doesn’t finish. He doesn’t have to. “She was in love with my dad or some shit. When Dad would pull his muck boots on in the morning, Mom would ask if he was going to visit _her_ again.” Ronan is unreasonably satisfied by causing Adam’s unfettered laugh. He grabs a pitch fork leaning against a support beam.

“What’s her name?”

“Naimh,” he says.

Adam can hear the foreignness of the word, a word that might look very different from how it sounds.

“Does it mean something?”

“Radiant one.” His eyes meet Adam’s in the afternoon light glazing the interior of the barn honey-colored. Then he looks away, adding some hay to one of the feeding troughs. “Naimh was a goddess from Tír na nÓg. That’s the land of eternal youth for uncultured swine such as yourself.”

“Ha.”

“She lured a mortal warrior away to marry her. Bunch of other shit happened. But that’s the gist of it.” Ronan sets the fork back against the pillar and jerks his head deeper into the barn. He steps over the low gate of the stall.

“Sounds like Niamh the cow turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Lured the mortal warrior away.”

Ronan laughs. “Dad said the same thing.”

They come upon the cow at the back of the barn, where the slats to the roof must be tighter because it’s darker and more humid back here. The animal smell is compounded by the humidity. It’s a strangely comforting, not altogether unpleasant smell, Adam thinks. For some reason, he recalls going past dairy farms in his dad’s backfiring truck and holding his breath against the smell.

The cow’s tail flicks when Ronan comes up beside her, patting her flank, reaching down to check something on her back hoof.

“She doesn’t seem depressed.” After a hesitant moment, he smooths a thumb along her velvet snout.

“That’s because I brought the bull to her.” Ronan gestures at the calf, hidden in the straw mound in the very back corner of the stall.

“Are you saying…”

“Yeah. I thought maybe if she had a baby…”

All of a sudden Adam understands. He thinks of the mother in the room upstairs with the open windows, the sons all waiting for her to awaken. Ronan’s attempts to revive the cow through her motherly instinct reveal his wishful thinking. Something complicated tugs beneath Adam’s ribs.

Ronan makes a clicking, kissing sound with his mouth. Adam can almost see the soft-hearted boy that grew up here. The calf clumsily trots over to Ronan’s waiting hand.

“Come here.” He’s talking to Adam.

“Why?” Adam asks, but he’s already drawing closer, a stranger in a strange land trying to take in everything—the smell of an animal much larger than himself existing here, the crackling straw covered ground, the boy before him, more present than he’s ever seen him.

“Meet Plúr.”

“Named after Niamh and the warrior’s child I take it?”

Ronan startles. His eyes are lurid in the dark closeness of the barn. “Do you know the myth?”

“No.”

“You knew they had children.”

“Isn’t that always endgame in those ancient myths? Progeny? Legacy?”

“Touché, asshole. And before your nerd ass asks, it’s Plúr na mBan for flower of women.”

Adam looks at the baby calf butting Ronan’s thigh.

“How old is she?”

“6 days.”

“She’s already that big?”

“It’s mostly just fluff. Come here. Pet her.”

“That’s okay,” Adam answers quickly.

Ronan’s head snaps up. Adam shifts under the icy discernment.

“Just because your dad beat the shit out of you doesn’t mean you’re going to hurt her.”

Adam can’t speak at first, can’t breathe. “Why do you do that?” he asks, full of vitriol.

He’s suddenly filled with understanding for why this never worked before, why he’d never even tried to be friends with Ronan, despite how easy it had felt up to this moment. He was _angry_ around him, how exposed he felt, how Ronan knew the exact shade and grit of the dirt from which he crawled.

“You see yourself as like, fated to follow that path or some shit. That’s not how it works.”

Worse, Adam feels safe in the anger licking like fire in his veins right now. He knows that though Ronan knows his origin, it doesn’t define him. This pisses him off too for some reason.

“How would you know?”

“Because otherwise I’d be a liar.” The next part of the sentence, ‘like my father’, hangs in the air. “And I don’t lie.”

“Ever?” Adam asks, his accent escapes him in his skepticism.

Ronan just looks down. His lashes fanned across his cheek make it look like his eyes are closed. Maybe they are.

He ruffles the calf’s head one more time and pats Niamh before herding Adam out through the gate.

They stand in the center of the barn, not leaving yet, wondering what to say, when something large comes galumphing up to the door. It’s Matthew Lynch.

“Hey, Adam!” he says brightly.

“Hey, Matthew.”

Matthew gently elbows Ronan’s arm. Ronan gently pushes Matthew’s head away. It’s a physical conversation that Adam doesn’t understand.

“Check out my new smartwatch.” He’s already lifting his wrist to Adam’s face.

“C’mon. He doesn’t care about that shit.”

“I use it mostly for training.”

“Oh yeah. Football, right?”

“Right!” Matthew says excitedly, his smile so bright it almost hurts to look at. Honestly, Adam would be a monster to not show interest in whatever the kid was talking about, even if it was the least interesting thing in the world. “It also tracks my sleep, like how much I toss and turn. The graphs are cool. Just _looking_ at them helps me fall asleep!”

“You need zero help falling asleep. And why would you need to track the fact that you sleep like the dead?”

Adam finishes scrolling through the features on Matthew’s phone. “It’s pretty cool,” Adam says.

“Ronan gets annoyed when I show it off.”

“That’s not very brotherly.” He was just teasing Ronan, but as soon as he says it, he realizes how awful it sounds. What would he know about brothers and fraternity?

“Oh, Ronan’s the best. He just hates phones and, really, anything having anything to do with them.”

“Why?”

Ronan grunts and moves to hang a fallen saddle back on the wall. There is no horse present.

“But you’re always playing music on it,” Adam says with a laugh.

Ronan looks at him strange, unguarded in his surprise for a moment.

“Yeah, that’s all he uses it for. You should ask Declan what the most calls he made to Ronan is without him answering.”

“Is it only your brother you don’t answer for?”

“He’s the only one who calls Ronan,” offers Matthew, helpfully.

“Thanks, Matthew.”

“What if someone else called?” Adam feels weird about it as soon as he asks it.

Ronan looks at him and then away, and that reassures Adam somehow. “I don’t know.”

“Maybe I should test it myself.”

Ronan freezes, then his face breaks into a smile someone could fall and get hurt on. Namely, Adam, who was feeling a little reckless anyway. “Maybe you’ll be disappointed. Maybe you won’t.”

Matthew wanders off toward Niamh’s gate. “Hi, Plúr,” he wheedles.

Adam just stares at him for a moment before getting his phone out and handing it to Ronan. Ronan looks at it with a curled lip, as though forgetting that the challenge would require having to give his number out, or having to touch a phone at all, really. He taps it in one digit at a time but doesn’t take the cell from Adam, just to annoy him.

Adam, unbothered, saves it as ‘Lynch’. He looks up at Ronan expectantly.

“What?”

“I just texted you.”

“So?”

“So you have my number. Is your phone on silent?”

“It’s under my bed, man.”

Adam’s laugh tears out of him. He doesn’t even cover his mouth.

They walk back up to the house. Declan is home. He is only one year older than them—two? Adam isn’t sure—but he’s always in a suit and it startles Adam. It’s a very expensive suit.

Declan eyes him, and Adam almost turns to hide the loose threading in the shoulder of his uniform sweater before he remembers Persephone sewed it. Adam doesn’t like to be analyzed. It reminds him too much of Niall’s sharp eye on him in the rearview, of the teachers in school when he hadn’t been able to hide the evidence of his father’s revolving disappointment in his existence, even Persephone’s steady mirror black eyes before she offered to take him in. He is astonished to recall that he once thought of her mirror black eyes as almost unhuman. Now he saw them with the endless warmth of black coffee and burnt firewood.

Declan’s attention turns to Ronan. He notes the space between the two of them, and his expression tightens.

“I hope you didn’t bring that carrion in with you.”

For a moment, Adam wonders if Declan is somehow referring to him. Then he remembers the bird Ronan had brought to school in his backpack. He steps away so as not to be associated with those in the room who bring birds to school in their backpacks.

“No.”

Declan nods, and turns back to the bills on the table.

“She’s already upstairs.”

“Goddamnit, Ronan.”

Ronan cackles, walking into the kitchen. “You hungry?” This he asks of Adam, who is still looking at the tense line of Declan’s back. He is wary of the tension in the room, but also analyzing why Ronan, the middle son, should be the broadest of the three, given that Declan is the eldest and Matthew plays football.

When he turns to answer Ronan, he decidedly does not look at the wide line of his shoulders.

“Sure.”

They’re eating peanut butter between bread when Matthew tromps upstairs after Declan, calling, “D, help me with my math!”

“Milk?” Ronan asks.

Adam shakes his head. Ronan drinks it straight from the gallon. Adam smiles, finishing his last bite and leaning on his elbows where he stands at the island.

Ronan puts the milk away. He’s still facing the fridge when he says, “you don’t really have to call.”

Adam looks up, confused.

“I know you hate me or whatever.” Ronan can’t really blame him. Most days, he doesn’t even want to know himself. He leans back against the opposite counter, knuckles white.

“What?” Adam’s face floods with embarrassment. “I can only hear out of one ear.”

“I know,” Ronan says, voice a little louder than before. “Your right one.”

He suddenly remembers Ronan staying to his right as they walked the property. Adam stares at him, unable to breathe. This feels large. Larger than the room, the sky. Somehow, Ronan’s words have slowly come to his one working ear.

“I don’t hate you,” says Adam, dazed by the assertion, by Ronan _noticing_ he favors one ear.

Ronan’s face does something complicated. “Thanks for that, Parrish.” He pushes off the counter and tries to leave the kitchen. Adam walks around the counter and touches his arm. Ronan completely freezes.

“You like me?” Adam asks, in awe, because he has just figured it out.

Ronan looks destroyed, breathing hard from his nostrils. He looks like he’s about to run for the hills. “Go conjugate your verbs, asshole.”

But it's not a denial. It's not Ronan throwing him against the wall. It’s not Ronan getting in his face or calling him a fucking fag. Adam drops his hand and lets him go. He can’t even begin to unpack this knowledge.

A few moments, or minutes, or hell, hours later, Persephone wanders into the kitchen, as though she wasn’t sure how she got here.

“Ready?” she asks.

Adam just laughs helplessly, a little manic. _Ronan likes me_.

So he spends the next couple days replaying that moment over and over in his head. He breaks the entire situation apart and looking at it from every angle, like getting to the engine in a Mini Cooper where everything has to be pulled out, each piece laid out so that you know the order in which to return it. He can’t stop the realization from creeping in as he’s doing homework or googling "how to be funny", the latter in some sort of warped gesture toward courtship. He drops his head to his hands. What is he doing? What does he want? He knows enough, peripherally, to know that Ronan Lynch is not someone to be played with. He can sense in the other boy's gaze which falls on him like an albatross around his neck that Ronan's affection is priceless and irretrievable if squandered. And Adam feels pressured to...to bear the burden of experience. Then, like finding the connection in a math assignment or the missing transition in a paper, he realizes the pressure wouldn’t be there unless...he wants it to mean something.


	4. Antidote

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man, I just can't stop with the Easter eggs. Collect them all for a full set! (just kidding. don't. Then you'll see how much I straight up ripped from the trc books *nervous laughter*)
> 
> The beginning of this chapter was inspired by the lovely, adorable fic [that perilous stuff (which weighs upon the heart)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24855754) by [JessJesstheBest](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JessJesstheBest/pseuds/JessJesstheBest)
> 
> If it seems like I perhaps rewatched Normal People and took copious notes on each scene for this fic, that's because I did. Let me know how it worked out. Please. This one was ripped from my soul, ya'll.

One night, Adam is reading Macbeth for English. Concurrently, he is thinking of Ronan’s agitated rocking of his pen that he used more for drawing rude pictures in the margins than for taking notes. He reads, 'Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain and with some sweet oblivious antidote cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart?’ The context was diametrically opposed to what he felt in his chest now but he thought, Yes. There was an antidote to ease the perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart.

The next day, Professor Neary keeps him after class. As his friends leave him behind, Eric makes an immature face at him. Neary sits on her desk, and Adam doesn’t look at her legs. She tells him that his story was good. She says he should submit it to literary magazines. He watches her carefully and knows that she honestly believes his work is good enough for that. This is something he put effort into just because he enjoyed it, not for survival, or a grade, or any kind of insurance toward his future. But because a voice in him spoke against that dominant part of him that tried to be quiet and keep his head down and it hadn’t been for naught. He’d found a kind of power in writing, and Professor Neary thinks the end result is worth submitting. He feels high.

So when Eric and Tad want to sneak behind the auditorium to vape, Adam pliantly floats behind. He jumps up onto the wall and tries to get ahead on his reading for World History.

“Parrish.” Eric knocks his shin.

“What are you doing for winter break?”

“Working.”

“You’re such a good boy.”

“Don’t,” says Adam.

Tad looks as though he wants to step in and also like he wants to see the interaction play out. Predictably, Eric gets bored and moves onto other subjects. “Fucking hate this test score shit.”

Adam can’t help but think about how the curse sounds so base when Eric says it. There is someone else he knows who can make it sound like poetry.

Tad takes a contemplative drag from his vape. It smells of sickeningly sweet and bitter vanilla.

“There has to be some sort of rubric for placing people after they leave high school.”

Adam is tempted to tell him ‘rubric’ is not the word he means right there.

“Exactly. It’s bullshit for someone’s future to hang on their ability to test well in this one supposedly representative cross-section of their entire education based on the arbitrary decisions of bureaucrats.”

Adam has not thought about it this way before (he also does not think in run-on sentences). He has always just followed protocol and done his best within the parameters laid out for him.

“I’m sure bureaucrats aren’t the only ones who decide what goes into our exams, Doyle,” says Tad, spitting at the wall below Adam’s feet.

“Maybe if I let Neary blow me the way she clearly wants to blow Parrish, I’ll up my GPA and get into the ivy leagues too.”

Adam takes a breath, keeps his eyes on his book. The worst part of that insult is he hasn’t even gotten in anywhere yet.

He knows Eric is insecure about school, his grades, that he struggles in at least half his classes. This is what he repeats to himself in his head as he feels himself drawing tighter and tighter, his rage burning through him. It was not easy getting to where he was now. He’d had to work for it, exhaustively, doggedly, literally working until his hands were chapped and blistered.

Adam thinks a thousand thoughts all at once. Persephone telling him Ronan is a sensitive person. Ronan’s plain smile through the windshield of the BMW, his skittish attention in the barn. Professor Neary squeezing his shoulder as he walked back to his seat after distributing handouts. Her legs. Her praise. The cracks in the skin of his hands from long nights at the garage, being exposed to the cold. His own fury, passed down by Robert Parrish through his blood.

He has emulated the behavior of these boys to fit in. He is even more furious that it worked, that he has been enveloped in their ranks through fraudulence.

Afraid to be seen for the monster under the uniform and the grades and the adoption, he shuts his book and jumps off the wall.

“I’m going to start heading to 6th,” he says.

He goes to the bathroom instead. Adam leans over the sink and washes his face. His hands shake, and he hates that he can’t pinpoint the exact reason for this anger. His brain is white noise. By the time he dries off his face with the rough paper towels, he doesn’t feel any calmer.

When he’d gone to pick up Persephone yesterday, he didn’t see Ronan. He suddenly misses their conversations. He misses Ronan. So he takes out his phone and he sends him a text.

***

He dreams of the Graywaren. The Graywaren gets agitated when Ronan gets too comfortable. He is a creator, a chaotic god in the story. Ronan fiercely wishes that the version of himself he dreamed into the Graywaren’s skin was the real version. He wanted to be the worldly instrument of a creation fire, source unknown—it didn’t matter when you could bring anything you wanted out—waking with blood speckled impossibly blue flowers in his hands, cars, _worlds_. Or maybe just this. Adam’s hand by the BMW and in the bathroom. Dry and callused.

 _God, let me have that again._ The wanting is so powerful it propels him out of sleep.

When he wakes, it’s right next to his bed. One of the bird man creatures that have stalked him in his dreams since he was a young child, since Matthew had fallen from the maple and broken his collar bone. That was the first time he’d tasted fear. He realized then, still bracketed in the tree branches, staring down at his brother who’d stopped breathing when he hit the ground, that losing all of this was possible. That's when the night horrors were born.

Ronan instinctively tries to cover his face now, but he is frozen, like he always is when he wakes to these hallucinations, living beings swarming just outside of his peripheral, just beyond his reach.

Instead, he thinks about what he’d been holding in the dream. The keys to Niall’s—no, Ronan’s now—BMW. They’d been in the ignition, and the car had been growling beneath his feet, waiting to be let off its leash. He’d been rubbing the shape of the key, desperately trying to commit the feel of it to memory. Ever since Ronan had texted Declan from St. Agnes, Declan carries the keys on him. He hasn’t seen them since. He even made him use the Volvo when for his driver’s test, though it was in Niall’s car, with Niall whooping in the passenger seat, that Ronan learned to drive at 13.

The paralysis, the hallucinations, the fierce injured wanting, of aching for something in your hands that was never there to begin with. None of this is normal. Declan had told him he should see someone. He’d thrown a fit at the time, but really though, what did Ronan know? Declan was the one who managed their father’s pieces and clients. Declan was the one who’d had to arrange their mother’s care and Niall’s funeral while Ronan and Matthew had the luxury of idly drowning in their grief. Declan was the one who took sleeping pills and kept a gun under the Volvo’s driver’s seat. For someone who didn’t lie, Ronan was an especially good lie detector, so despite the fact that Declan wouldn’t want them to know any of this, Ronan knew. And if being a corporate automaton, being like Declan, was what you turned out to be when you didn’t talk about the shit in your head, this was not ideal. He wonders if just this once, Declan might be right.

Breaking free of the hallucination and his dreams that clamored for him, he got out of the bed, chest heaving. He looks around his room. Everything feels fast and slightly unreal every time this happens. He does his best to ignore it. Does familiar things like takes an excessively long hot shower. Stomps around in the back fields. Takes restive breaks to feed Chainsaw and okay fine, feed himself too. Rides dirt bikes with Matthew.

At some point the next day, his phone, which he is surprised to realize he is carrying, goes off with a noise against his leg. All he knows about the noise is that it is what the phone does when one of his brothers wants his attention. Which means he checks it 50% of the time. The logic is flawless, really. Now, he swats at it, like he might swat a fly at his ear.

As they’re driving to church, he digs in his pockets for the tithe and pulls out his phone. He sees it’s still blinking, desperately trying to get his attention. He huffs in a put-upon way, reminding himself too much of Declan, and checks his goddamn messages.

 **Parrish** 1:42 PM: _Testing…Testing 1, 2, 3_

In church, and after, at the restaurant they always attend after church and just as diligently for it had been a tradition their father had established, Declan doesn’t ask him if he’s considered seeing someone, and they are, as a result, friendly-adjacent.

Ronan realizes the reason he hadn’t asked was because he’d been planning to take a bunch of Mom and Da’s stuff out of the house to leave on a thrift store dock. It was stacked in boxes by the door. Pieces of Ronan’s childhood, pieces of his parents, pieces of moments where he and Declan had played and he’d felt like Declan liked him. All to be anonymously left at a Goodwill. Ronan felt like retching. Who the fuck had Declan allowed in here to pack all this up? Or had he done it while Ronan was at school and hidden the boxes until today. This possibility was worse.

As he carried the boxes back to the innermost depths of the house, everything surreal again, Declan calls after him, “Have you thought about what you plan to do, other than sit around with all of this stuff for the rest of your life?”

He really hadn’t. This was all he wanted, all he needed. It infuriated Ronan that this wasn’t enough for Declan. He felt badly shaken. A little like he couldn’t catch a breath. He hides away in his dad’s office with the purloined boxes which should have never been removed in the first place. Ronan thought of the words of their father’s will read aloud to them by the lawyer.

_I give my entire interest in the real property which was my residence at the time of my death (“The Barns”), together with any insurance on such property, to my middle son._

_Why, Dad? What did you want me to do with it?_ He, Ronan Lynch, who has little to no aspiration to better himself through either education or employment in any of the commonly accepted forms. He wondered if this bothered Declan. It seemed like Declan spent every possible moment _not caring._

After safely confiscating all of the boxes, Ronan sits with his mom, trying to get some of the comfort he used to get from her. The same refrain continued in his head. _What am I supposed to do? What the hell am I?_

He thinks he might try it Declan’s way and “see someone”, even if it is only to vent about his asshole brother the entire time. But for now, he finds himself in the barn with the closed door, he walks through the boneyard, looking at the unfinished pieces. Some of this stuff is beautiful, with so much promise it hurts to look at. His dad’s original works were always better, more fanciful than his forgeries, Ronan thought. Ronan couldn’t bear the thought of them ever being moved from the state Niall had left them in.

_What am I supposed to do?_

He wanted that book. He wanted to read the stories his dad used to tell them. He wanted Declan to laugh. He wanted to not see his baby brother at his mother’s bed side. He wanted his mother to wake up.

He wanted to be able to talk to his dad again. To hear his voice. To hear him reciting poetry in his theatrical way. He had a mind sharp as a diamond and fortified as a vault.

“Call down the hawk from the air!”

That was always how he began: apropos of nothing when the mood struck him. He would turn, eyes glittering, checking to be sure he had their attention.

When he did, he would lower his voice, “Let him be hooded or caged / till the yellow eye has grown mild, / for larder and spit…are bare,” he finished this line in confusion, mild surprise. “The old cook enraged, / the scullion gone wild.” These he delivered laughingly.

His dad could always make him understand things.

His dad would probably be able to explain what the hell he was doing at a soccer game, unable to take his eyes off Adam Parrish running the field. Seeing Adam out here, flushed and sweating, fully and unapologetically occupying of his body was almost too much for Ronan to look at. Adam’s concentrated single-mindedness after turning off the thinking portion of himself, the evident pride at his achievements and loose smile were going to make Ronan burst. He doesn’t know what to do with himself, so when Matthew wildly cheers him on, Ronan does too.

Adam doesn’t even glance at him in school, so Ronan is surprised when the second text comes three days later. It’s bizarre hearing from Adam on non-Persephone days.

 **Parrish** 5:51 PM: _Do you ignore texts too?_

 **Ronan** 6:07 PM: _Sorry. I was washing my hair_

 **Parrish** 6:07 PM: _For 3 days? Just tell a guy if you don’t feel like talking._

Ronan doesn’t know what to reply, because that sounds like something he isn’t equipped to answer. It sounds dangerously close to something he cannot allow himself to believe is happening.

So instead he says, _I never feel like talking._

 **Parrish** 6:10 PM: _You seemed to feel like it in the barn, telling me all about Niamh._

Ronan had only ever heard the story told to him, so it was jarring to see the name in writing. It was also strangely uplifting to think of Adam looking it up after he’d left. He doesn’t answer. He cannot forget that this is the speck of a boy he watched on the soccer field, surrounded and worshipped by people that weren’t Ronan. Adam doesn’t need him. He only comes over out of necessity. But Adam wouldn’t let him sullenly ignore his prior messages so easily. He kept trying to talk to Ronan. Almost like he didn’t come around solely for Persephone.

 **Parrish** 9:47 PM: _Enlighten me as to your preferred method of communication._

Ronan doesn’t know what to say for a full day. He hates staring at this screen, trying to imagine what Adam means. If there is an alternate meaning or if it is just words that communicate exactly what they say. Phones, specifically texting seems like the stupidest way to talk to someone that had ever been invented. Like Morse code would be more effective than this shit. Fucking smoke signals.

41 hours later, Ronan gets another beer and answers Adam. He hears Declan’s voice in his head. _I wouldn’t advise that._

 **Ronan** 3:55 PM: _Come over_

Persephone doesn’t even come on Wednesdays. And Adam doesn’t respond. He went too far, just like with the blackberries. Even though Adam had been the one to eat from his hand, Ronan had somehow felt guilty.

No. Adam Parrish never does anything he doesn’t want to do.

This was confusing as shit. Adam doesn’t answer for so long that Ronan throws his phone down in frustration—this is exactly why he hates these things. You don’t know shit with phones. He thrusts on his boots and stomps out of the house to the tractor, because the power and durability of a John Deere sound exactly like what he needs right now.

After an indeterminable amount of time, unsuccessfully spinning in the tractor, Ronan sees Matthew running toward him. His happiness to see Matthew is somewhat stunted by the inconvenience that Declan is home too. He hates the idea of Declan walking among all their parents’ shit that he wants to get rid of anyway. It makes Ronan’s secrets feel dreadfully close to the surface.

***

Nonsensically, he had not expected to see anyone but Ronan. So when the door was opened with a gust of cologne-heavy air by Not Ronan, Adam was left in the awkward position of physically _feeling_ the smile that had crept onto his face in anticipation of seeing Ronan and at the irony of knocking for once. It was a small smile, but it felt ridiculously garish, even looking into the sun of Matthew Lynch’s smile. “Hey, Adam.”

“Hi, Matthew.”

Matthew keeps smiling at him, and nods his head as though Adam has said something he agrees with. “Oh!” he says suddenly. “You’ll be wanting Ronan, I guess.”

This embarrasses Adam, but he follows Matthew into the den or sunroom or library off to the right. Adam has never been in here, and he is instantly taken with this room. 

The room feels very full of Lynches without a single one of them. A set of bagpipes is stuffed onto an upper shelf with a guitar-like instrument hanging on the wall near it. Not a banjo, but Adam wasn’t sure.

A grimy decoy duck, some ugly vases and even uglier decorative glass plates. A frame with silver spoons in it. A frame with butterflies pinned in it that makes Adam smile, feeling a little victory at having pinned Ronan down. He likes the idea of someone like Ronan liking him. It feels vain, but look at where Ronan came from, and look where he came from. Also on the shelf are philosophy and folktales. The entire motley collection has the effect of being whimsical and spontaneously gathered here. It feels like he’s looking at the history of this house, this family.

This place felt full of magic, a key to unlock a boy. Adam feels like an interloper here, a thief of dreams, trying to imagine himself growing up in this place. He wants it so bad, it hurts. This must be what Ronan feels at school, constantly wanting out, feeling like every moment of it steals something from you--the way Adam himself once felt…everywhere--because he cannot imagine having this place to call home and wanting to be anywhere else.

Ronan had told him once, “I can’t breathe in that place.”

“It’s just school.”

The way Ronan had looked at him, and now, after seeing this room, the pictures of his parents, the car that carried the myth of a great father, Adam understood.

“You played well last week.”

He jumps and turns to find Ronan leaning in the doorway. Adam is caught off guard by his tank top and ripped jeans. He can hardly look at him, second-guessing his certainty that Ronan had a crush on him, underwriting all of his smugness. Ronan smells of hay and not unpleasantly of sweat. The innocence of it almost undoes Adam.

“That’s awfully nice of you to say.” Adam purposely loosens his hold on his accent, because he notices the way Ronan has looked at him when it was audible.

“It’s the truth.” Ronan gives an indifferent shrug.

Adam isn’t sure how he imagined this conversation going, but it seems like it’s going to have roadblocks everywhere he turns. There are no answers in the rolling fields out the window.

“I can be nice.”

This brings Adam’s eyes back to Ronan, who looks distinctly uncomfortable. Though Ronan’s discomfort soaks into him from across the room, Adam laughs, feeling giddy. “Man, that’s the biggest lie you’ve ever told.”

Adam thinks about when Niall and his wild haired son had picked him. He has a convoluted reaction to that moment. It's only now, from the security of his adoption by Persephone, that he realizes Niall Lynch irrevocably upset and altered the path of his life by doing the behind-the-scenes work he must have done to ensure Adam's situation was investigated and rectified. He could have been a much more desperate, desolate thing, a coyote picking remains, trying to survive rather than live. Was Adam grateful for that divergence from what would have continued to be a painful path? Yes. But Adam hadn't been given a chance to decide for himself. Who did this man think he was to play God in other people's lives with his money? Worst of all Adam felt he owed a debt he could never repay.

Adam really looks at Ronan. Ronan allows it as he rubs the edge of the curtain between his fingers. If Adam could draw or paint, he would specialize in Ronan’s eyebrows. The point, where the hair was thicker and completely unruly. He looked so wild. He kept seeing the boy from the day he was saved, the last day of his first life, superimposing over this Ronan. This sharper, more coiled and charged version of a loving, trusting child. God, what Adam would not give to have had that from the beginning. Who would he be? _Who would he be?_

Ronan notices the book in his hand.

“Where the fuck did you get this?”

He steps forward and Adam offers it up. “I just found it right here.”

“Jesus, man. I’ve been looking for this!”

“Why?”

“It’s a book of stories my dad used to tell us.” With the book between his hands, everything about the boy in front of Adam has changed since he walked into the room. He’s softer, reverent.

“You know. The way you are in school…I know you’re not really like that.”

“What am I like then, Parrish?”

Adam couldn’t stop staring at Ronan’s bare shoulders. He ran his thumb over the pages of another book he’d picked up. _Scritch, scratch_. Each time he does it, the book gasps out a scent of moldering pages. He can’t answer.

Ronan takes pity on his inability to communicate. He gestures with his eyebrows more than anything to the book in Adam’s hands. “Your friends know you like books so much, Parrish?”

“They wouldn’t care. They definitely wouldn’t be interested in”—Adam turns the book in his hand—“Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious.”

“They’re not interested in the world?”

“Not the way we would be.”

“We?”

Adam says nothing.

Ronan concedes, “My dad said every book was a window to another world. Mom said—says poetry is the language of the soul.”

Adam feels those two sentiments down to his core. That was why, after all, he loved English. He wants to tell Ronan about the story he sent out into the world the night before. Instead of saying any of this, he excuses his friends, because they are after all, an extension of him in some ways.

“They’re interested in other things.”

Ronan’s face shifts from something wistful to something hard. “Right, like bragging about who they’re boning.”

“Yeah,” laughs Adam, resigned.

“Doesn’t it bother you?”

“Not really. They can like what they want to like. If they don’t see anything in Yeats or Frost.” But he doesn’t finish. And he doesn’t have to, because Ronan knows Adam is desperate enough to appear normal that he will be friends with those assholes despite them not having a goddamn idea about tragedy or pain.

Ronan chews at his bracelets, looking vulnerable, corruptible. And Adam is overwhelmed by that same hunger that possesses him in Ronan’s presence. It makes him reckless.

“You said the other day that you like me.”

Ronan drops his hand, turns those nearly colorless eyes on Adam. “You said that.”

“You didn’t deny it.”

Ronan looks away.

“I wasn’t sure,” Adam prompts, voice gentle. A little for Ronan, a little for himself. This was it. This was the last time he’d put himself out there. Those texts he’d sent out, unanswered for days, burned him worse than he could have prepared for.

“You sure as fuck seemed sure.”

Adam ignores that. He needs to say this. It’s ricocheting inside of him, doing internal damage. “I’m a little confused…about what I feel.”

“Need to record your hypothesis and observations before you come to a conclusion, Parrish?” It sounds hurt. Ronan takes a breath. “You could, you know. Explore this, or what the fuck ever, if you need to do it, to know. You could do…anything you want to me.”

Adam watches as Ronan’s skin turns ruddy, first right above his collarbone, then his neck. A wave of something tears through Adam’s body, and while he does not know how to describe it, it is, objectively, good. Out of control, he steps forward. Stops. Swallows.

“It would be…awkward in school if something happened between us.” Why were these words even coming out of his mouth?

If possible, Ronan’s face grows even more derisive. He steps closer, but when he looks up, his face is carefully impassive.

“Who the fuck would I tell?” It’s hypothetical, and the longer Adam watches him, the more defenseless Ronan looks, the more uncertain.

“Can I?” It's a question that means more to Adam than Ronan could possibly know. Adam Parrish never asked for anything in his life. He’d learned that very early on. Only now, was it something he was actively practicing.

_Can I have more pie?_

_Can I have the car tonight?_

It made Persephone's entire being beam with light and satisfaction. She always offered him the item in question wordlessly. Thank you he would say. You're welcome she would say and it sounded different than when other people said it. It sounded like it was meant to sound.

Ronan’s breath comes harsh through his nose. He jerks his head once.

Adam kisses him. Ronan kisses him back, slow and sweeter than Adam imagined. When Adam forces himself to step back, Ronan’s blush is deeper, collarbone to cheeks, eyes wide.

“That was...wow,” Adam laughs. He doesn't know why he laughs, but he knows he has laughed more talking to Ronan for the last fifteen minutes than he has all week.

“Why are you laughing?”

He can see Ronan’s shoulders curling in.

“Nothing. That was really nice.” God, with anyone else those words would have been ran around Aglionby on a banner with a blown-up picture of Adam, his face as open and elated as he knew it was right now.

“Yeah,” says Ronan, unsure. “Good,” he adds.

“You act like you've never kissed anyone before.” He can’t hold back his accent—he’s too dazed.

Ronan’s eyes are like bullets. “Maybe because I fucking haven’t.”

Adam recalibrates every truth his body whispers to him in this moment to this truth: Ronan just chose him for his first kiss.

“God, Ronan,” says Adam, laughing to himself, nervous and gleeful, hand pulling the back of his neck, before reaching out to pull Ronan toward him. “Let me make it a little better then.”

Later, Ronan lies on his bed. Chainsaw has been fed—he’d let Matthew do it this time, and now he is holding his phone on his chest, idly scratching the ears of the barn cat curled at his waist. Declan pops into the doorframe. Mostly just his head. Ronan has this theory that Declan is embarrassed for anyone to see him in his pajamas. Like, he cannot stand to be idle, even if it’s to perform the biological necessity of sleeping.

“I told you not to let that cat in.”

“You said that about the raven, actually.”

“Which you are now keeping in a cushioned cage, so I am not sure why I am bothering. But that,” he stabs his finger at the cat, “could have ticks.”

The cat lays its head back to gaze at Declan, upside down. Ronan wonders if you’d be able to see Declan’s metal filling like that, the only one of all of the Lynches to get a cavity. Declan, religious flosser, was positively chagrined by the entire situation. He’d been 11.

“I would have thought you’d be more understanding of your brethren.” It looks like Declan isn’t sure whether he means the cat or the…yeah, he gets it.

“Do you want to be grounded?”

Ronan barks out a laugh. “Okay, dad.”

The silence is thin and waiting. Ronan pounces on it. “He keeps the mice away. I thought you valued items of use,” says Ronan, mocking Declan’s precise enunciation. Declan’s eyebrow twitches down over his eye, which in DeclanSpeak means: I am amused.

“You still have a phone,” he says, possibly to distract Ronan from Emotions.

Ronan glares.

“What?” Declan asks, incredulous. “It’s a legitimate concern. I've never seen you with it and you never answer my calls.”

“That's because I don’t like you.”

Declan leans on the door smiling, not even caring that he’s revealing his silk striped Neiman Marcus pants and old bouzouki festival T-Shirt. It's a real smile and it really looks just like their dad’s. Ronan hurts everywhere. He looks out the window. He wants that weight Adam's lips took off his chest for a little bit longer.

“What?” Ronan barks.

“Is that the best you got? Could it be that you’re… too preoccupied with your phone, like the 17 year old you are?”

Ronan tries to glare harder, but Declan appears to be have been born with special antibodies to Ronan’s glowering.

“From whom are you awaiting a call?”

“Bye, Dicklan.”

“No, seriously—”

“Bye—”

“I just—”

“Dick—”

“Want—”

“Lan.”

“To know who has my baby brother all tied up in knots.”

“Fuck off, man.” Ronan throws his pillow, but Declan’s already out of the room, cackling down the hallway. The cat dived off of Ronan as soon as he moved for the assault, using his claws for leverage. Bastard.

Ronan throws his head back on the mattress, then turns and hugs his other pillow to his chest, the itch quieted enough that he falls asleep.


	5. Catalyst(s)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a long one of pure, indulgent fluff, and I am not one bit sorry about it

“Have you decided which college you want to go to?”

Adam hums, looking distractedly at a can of pie filling. Persephone lightly slaps his hand. He puts it down.

They are grocery shopping. They are talking about college. This is worlds away from the scene seven years ago of Adam in this same grocery store, filled with the misplaced shame of not having money enough for toothpaste and canned ravioli. While Persephone won’t talk household finances with him, she often has him pull from her account or pay the electric bill at the market downtown, so he knows they are fine. He does not feel any of the old misery associated with his past life.

“I haven’t gotten in anywhere yet.”

“But when you do, will you already know which one is the place you belong?”

Persephone stands in front of the flour, her chin on her fist. She is only four inches shorter than him, but so _small_ somehow, even with all of her hair piled on top of her head and precariously secured with some sort of super strength clip. While the clip works valiantly, some hair escapes to hang down her back and around her face. She’s wearing loose-fitting overalls, rolled up above shiny Doc Martens. The boots remind him of Ronan, which makes him feel hot suddenly.

He tilts back a bag of King Arthur, wondering why it costs more than the other eight kinds of flour. How can there be so many makers of flour? What made one product superior to the others? And if they were all the same, why bother getting into the flour business and adding another moot option to this shelf? He asks none of these questions, because Persephone’s pie was the best thing he’d ever tasted and he was not going to undermine her process.

“So there is one particular place I should choose above the others?”

Persephone hums. “I never said that.” She grabs the precise King Arthur flour he had been examining and sets it in the cart as gently as if it were a carton of eggs.

“But you implied it.”

“I didn’t, because it’s not true. It only becomes the place you belong when you decide to go there.” She slowly starts down the aisle. Adam slowly follows with the cart. Neither of them particularly enjoy grocery shopping, but they both enjoy the other’s comforting company. “Have you done a reading?” This is the first time she has ever acknowledged the cards she gave him.

“Yes. That’s the thing. It’s unclear.”

She smiles with pride nonetheless. “Maybe you’re not ready for the answer.”

“What does that even mean?” he asks, laughing.

This is one of those questions Persephone chooses not to hear. It’s harder to get her talk about something you actually want to talk about. She is an attentive parent, but often…preoccupied.

“I really like Georgetown.”

Persephone nods and smiles dreamily. Adam cannot be sure if it is in reference to his choice or the aluminum-free baking powder she’s holding. He appreciates that she doesn’t tell him what she thinks he should do—most likely, she stubbornly does not bear an opinion either way. In her mind, it is wholly his decision, his future to envision. Just the way he has always wanted it. But in this instance, he really wants to know her opinion on the matter. He wants to talk this out with her. Get a picture for what it will look like, logistically.

“I don’t like the idea of you being alone when I go.”

“When,” she repeats and then nods. “When you go. Why not?” She directs this at him, stopping in the middle of the aisle to look pointedly at him so that he has to stop the cart or hit her. “I was alone before you. I will be alone after you.”

He feels hot again for a different reason. Embarrassed to presume _he_ , in any way, takes care of _her_ , though his discomfort is entirely lost on her.

He opens his mouth to argue, that he is worried she would be lonely—but neither of them were ever lonely—that she wouldn’t be safe—but she could clearly hold her own. He laughs instead. “I don’t know.”

“Adam?” The voice, drawling and unsure, comes from behind him.

Adam turns and is startled like being violently awoken from a dream to see his biological mother standing halfway down the aisle, just 5 bags of flour away. He feels like a trough of cold water has been upended over his head and won’t stop pouring, like he can’t catch breath because of how cold it is. He is frozen, half turned between his guardian and the woman who gave birth to him, one hand gripping the cart, the other throbbing uselessly at his side as blood pools into it.

Adam stares at her but he isn’t seeing her. He is living an inward agony, his head bouncing off the railing for the stairs up to their trailer, 10 times—100 times, in the span of a second.

Something is being said, but Adam cannot track the conversation. He is too busy focusing all of his hearing to listening for his father’s voice. Persephone has come to his side. He looks over at her, dazed to see her there. She looks more present than he has ever seen her, since the day he met her and squirmed in the chair before her, unmarked but more broken than he had ever been before, feeling like a bug under the microscope of her mirror black eyes.

“He’s my husband. What was I supposed to do?”

His mother’s words bring him back to her standing there in her dress faded from washing, her tired shoes. She looks at Persephone, a flash of desperation in her eyes before it turns to repugnance.

“You and your husband have been ordered by the courts to stay away from him.” While her voice is small, child-like, Adam can hear something wavering in Persephone’s tone. Some latent power, barely checked.

“The courts can’t tell me I can’t talk to my son.”

“I have been Adam’s legal guardian for four years now, Mrs. Parrish." She stops, seems to think of something. "Adam, do you wish to speak to her?"

He knows he has been asked a question and he knows it is his duty to respond to his elder, but he cannot make his voice work right now. His chest feels tight with the impending fear of seeing his father appear at the end of the aisle. He brings his eyes back to his mother, because she at least deserves to know that he is certain in his response. In lieu of talking, he shakes his head. 

Persephone gives a perfunctory nod; Adam has never seen Persephone do anything perfunctorily. "You need to leave.”

When his mother doesn't move, Persephone stares her down with her unwavering black gaze.

“It’s not right,” his mother says, stumbling a little as she turns, in her haste to get away. When she repeats herself, Adam hears her voice hitch a little. He turns forward again, putting both hands on the cart to stop himself from going after her and touching the always cool skin of her arm and asking if his dad has turned to taking it out on her. It is an instinct almost, biologically ingrained because she is his mother, but it is also nurture, pattern, Pavlovian response, whatever. Because while his father cut him down and his mother endorsed his words, she and Adam shared a silent language of survival. Which cabinets not to open all the way so as not to wake Robert Parrish, to never turn off the TV when he fell asleep in the living room, to make sure Adam was out of the way and dinner was ready and hot when he got home.

He pulls himself out of the past, gasping for breath, but he’s unable to completely shake its hold on him. Persephone is still looking down the opposite end of the aisle, shaking. He can feel it because they are almost shoulder to shoulder.

“I did not handle that very professionally.”

“You’re not a caseworker anymore,” he says, allowing logic to override the instability he feels right now. Even though he already feels like his first life permeates this life like radiation, right now he feels the warning signs prior to the reactor meltdown.

“Does it bother you?” Persephone’s curious voice helps anchor him.

“Does what bother me?”

“That I clean houses.”

“How could it bother me? I’m trailer trash.” Even as he says it, he hates the way he sounds. Also, it doesn’t ring true. Not when he has found a home and someone that has shown him what it means to be loved without giving anything in return.

“You are not your past or your future. You are who you choose to be in each moment.”

Adam hugs her and it is the first time he has initiated physical contact with her. Not because he has ever been averse to it. In fact there have been dozens of times he had wanted to reach out, to touch, or be touched, to have his cheek smoothed, his shoulders hugged to her side, or, pathetically, have his head patted. All affections he has seen his friends mothers’ bestow upon them—never the woman that had stood before him moments ago asking for something he’d have gladly given before, but that he absolutely could not give now. He had never initiated physical contact before, because he was afraid of how much he wanted it. He was afraid to take too much. The adoption itself was already too perfect, too vital to him—someone _wanted_ him, wanted to care for him, _valued_ him. That should be enough.

But he silences all of this and hugs her anyway because she has given him something he could never repay no matter what school he went to, or what job he got, or how much money he made: hope.

Later, after the groceries have been unloaded and they’ve eaten a late lunch to tide them over until they, inevitably, have pie with coffee and tea for dinner, Adam presses his back into a corner in his room. He can no longer find that hope. The moment he entered his room, and was alone without all of the warm distractions of home, and Persephone, and food, he is flooded by the past.

He cannot loosen the grip of his hands holding his knees or he will dissipate like molecules exposed to radiation. From the moment his father first hit him without pattern or reason, and overturning his idea of ‘father’ as protector to aggressor, Adam has been dissipating.

Logically, he knows his mother was abused in a more insidious but quieter way, but his father’s anger will need a new outlet. And he had to be furious about how things went down. Even if they didn’t want Adam, they wouldn’t have wanted anyone else to have him, because that’s exactly the kind of people they were. Warped logic. Obstinate. He has not visited this place in his mind often since getting out. It’s another tool for his survival, another heavy stone on the battlement. But seeing her again, her hollow eyes and frail frame, he is caught in a storm of worrying for her which twists with a fucked up sense of homesickness. He is fucked up. If he was a better son, he would have stayed and taken his father’s blows. But the call of the wild boy and his god-like father lured him into their car and he drove away for good. Adam remembers not caring what happened to him as he slumped, boneless, in that backseat without a tick of self-preservation to spare.

The entire squall of thoughts, almost manic in their revolution, round and round in his head, takes hours from him. When he notices the sun’s coral glow on his floor, he knows it is nearing dinner time, but he cannot move even when he smells pie and hears Sinatra on the record player. Persephone is giving him space. It’s not space that he needs.

He could never say that.

At school, he keeps his head down, is quiet in class and at lunch. He derives little comfort from his exhaustive note-taking. He finds even less comfort in watching Ronan who acts like nothing has happened. Ronan’s first kiss, and Adam’s first kiss with a boy—Adam’s first time even considering a boy like that, and Ronan is just as coiled as always to attack. Until he finally-- _f_ _inally--_ pays Adam one assessing gaze and Adam feels so thin. He is so fatigued by his unrelenting overthinking.

He needs to get out of the realm of the mind and into the realm of matter. He needs something to ground him. 

***

It’s just the two of them on the roof, because Matthew has taken his pillow into their parent’s room to sleep at Mom’s bedside. They have received the diagnosis for their mother that they have been waiting for. She is not likely to wake up. The doctor does not say they need to make a choice, but she hints at it as a future possibility. Ronan thinks if she said they needed to make a choice, efficient Declan would have made it. He would have put it on the calendar so that his brothers had time to deal with it (or more likely given himself time to fight with Ronan about it and comfort Matthew about it). They have to mourn their mother all over again.

“So, Peace Corp, huh?”

Ronan halfheartedly scoffs at that. Matthew had told them he was thinking about joining. “Those bastards would be lucky to have him.”

“You’re right,” Declan says, voice quiet. A truth. “Too bad for him _Candy’s_ parents don’t feel that way.” They both assume that Matthew’s sudden urgency to join the Peace Corp stems from, not unrequited love, but the far more tragic _forbidden_ love.

“Not everyone can get invited for the after-dinner cigar. Remember the country club prick, _Ashley’s_ Dad?”

Declan scoffs now, but it turns into a cough. “How could I forget?” he asks dryly.

Ronan smiles a gallows smile. He appreciates his brother’s enduring scrappiness despite what he aspires to _appear_ to be.

“What about you? Are you just what your boyfriend’s parents had in mind?”

Ronan’s heart stalls. He gives it some gas and comes to, choking on air. “What the fuck, man?” He hasn’t spoken to Declan at all about a boyfriend, girlfriend, anything. The only time they’ve discussed it was when Declan noticed he suddenly remembered he had a phone. But he _knows_?

“What? You thought I didn’t know?”

“I don’t care. Say what you want to say.”

“I don’t want to say anything.” Declan’s voice has always sounded so disinterested, even since they were children. And not in the aggressively disinterested tone Ronan employs like a weapon, but truly void of emotion. Ronan knows it is a front, because he has special antibodies against his elder brother’s lies. And his indifference is one of his biggest lies of all. So Ronan feels a bit like the new skin under a scab that has been torn away.

“Well, I just want to say this one thing—”

“I fucking knew it!”

He sees Declan look at him out of the corner of his eye. He looks back with his aggressive disinterest, but his eyes don’t quite meet the mark.

“I only want to say, that it’s okay.”

“Thanks for your permission to be how I was literally born.”

“You’re angling for a fight on this. But I only wish you wouldn’t assume I would care who you love.”

Ronan feels alarmed at the idea of love. Of loving Adam. Of ever being allowed to love Adam.

“Honestly, do you give a shit that I am attracted to women?”

“Other than how it’s kind of gross the way you go through them, no.”

Declan laughs. “Well, there you go.”

Declan swirls his liquor in the crystal tumbler. Ronan folds a strand of hay into smaller and smaller pieces, creasing it with his nail until he has an accordion. “Should you be drinking that with those pills you take?”

Declan looks at him, eyes cool and questioning. He won’t outright say “what pills”. Ronan thinks that maybe even a liar can respect someone who gets by in only truths, obfuscated or otherwise.

“Come on, man. Mattie knows too.”

“Probably not. It’s not like I’m getting shit-faced or anything.” He looks pointedly at Ronan.

Ronan is happy because it feels like Declan has been home more, but a part of him wonders if it is because he knew this was coming and knew he and Matthew would each need him in their own, unique ways.

“Here's the situation,” says Declan, before tossing back the rest of his drink and setting the tumbler beside him. He leans back to dig something out of his pocket. 

What he offers to Ronan are the keys to the BMW. Begrudgingly, he admits Ronan’s done better in school and out of it, that he's going to put his trust back in Ronan, but Ronan recognizes it for what it is. A peace offering. A consolation prize for the shitty news about his mother that he will deal with later in private, but truly, they have been mourning her loss for months now.

Ronan levels a steady, confirming gaze on him. “With the exception of talking back to Whelk and getting detention.” He cannot tell if this is real.

Declan cringes. “That guy is a codfish. Consider this a reward for that if you’d like.”

Ronan whoops, surprised. “You asshole,” he laughs, clutching the keys tightly in his palm.

In the ensuing silence, they provide a stalwart comfort for one another, before they pick their way back to Ronan’s window.

Ronan goes for a drive. His first since February. Since needing to feel something and St Agnes and blood _pat, pat, pat_ on the kneeler and Declan’s impossible strength, impossible misery, impossible worry. No, possible. Here is Ronan with the proof that Declan cares for him, knows that he needs this.

Unfortunately, driving around town in his father’s car doesn’t make him feel any better about his Mom. Well, he doesn’t feel _much_ better. At least for the length of the drive, he felt something aside from that itch. The November wind numbing his skin—he hadn’t even put a jacket on—the shuddering bass of his music, the elation at the memory of Adam Parrish kissing him, it was so similar to this feeling of speeding down the country roads, lights cutting through the black.

Even though it’s late, he won’t be able to sleep. So he retrieves the book of folktales from his room, the book Adam found. In his dad’s office off the back of the house, he digs through the drawers of his father’s desk for something to write notes on, until he finds the cards Niall used for buyers’ contact information. Because he can’t be in there right now—he does not have the space inside of him to miss both parents at one time—he finds himself in the seldom used family room. He starts shredding the blank notecards to mark the story about the Graywaren and anything else he thinks might be important, codes from his dad or just anything that reminds him of his mother, anything that gives him hope. But by the time he finishes, there are so many little bits of paper sticking out of the book, he tosses it onto the table and holds his head in his hands.

He gets shit-faced instead. 

***

Four days after they’ve kissed and one surprising text from Ronan last night—reading simply, _Conclusion?_ —Adam is on his way home from school, then stops, backs up. Impossibly, Adam realizes Ronan is referring to his idea that Adam testing a hypothesis.

It was only yesterday he was pressed into the corner of his bedroom, trying to take up as little space as possible. It was only eighteen hours ago he was adrift in the past, a child in a trailer with no room to spare, even for someone as small as he had been. But now he is cut clean through by desire. He is seeking the realm of matter. 

He takes the road that leads him out the Lynch estate. Crunch of tires on the drive as he rolls up. He gets out. The car door sounds louder knowing he isn’t expected. He wonders whether Declan is home.

He skips up the steps, uniform still impeccable. He rings the bell and puts his hands into his pockets, a precautionary measure. The fact that he is here, unexpected and without forethought, means that his desire is overriding everything.

The door opens fast, and there is after-school Ronan, already changed out of his uniform and gazing steadily at him, very different from school Ronan who pretends like Adam doesn’t exist.

“Hi,” Adam says, trying to keep expectation out of his voice.

“Your mom isn’t here.”

“Persephone isn’t my mom,” he says, annoyed.

Ronan nervously beats the side of his fist against the door frame—that he is nervous is _very_ obvious to Adam—but he tries to keep it snarky anyway. “Sorry. Your _adoptive_ _parent_ isn’t here.”

“Can I come in?”

Ronan scoffs. “I don’t know. Can you?”

Adam is immune to his mood, because he remembers the sound that came from deep inside Ronan when they’d kissed. That small gasp punctured by Ronan’s raspy voice. He needs to make sure that what he felt in that moment, in that strange room of Lynch magic, against Ronan’s mouth, was real.

Ronan leads him into what looks like a more formal family room, where he’s got books open all over the low table in front of a heavy, lived-in couch. It is a different room than they were in last week.

“You’ve been busy.” Adam surveys it all, studiously ignoring Ronan, who leans back on the arm of the couch right in front of him, crossing his arms.

Ronan tears his eyes away from Adam to look over at the horde of books.

“Yeah. Just…trying to remember…”

“What?”

“Everything.”

Adam doesn’t know what that means. He tries for casual. “Saw you drove the BMW to school.”

Adam tracks Ronan’s response, his tightened shoulders, the crease that appears between his eyebrows. Though he can’t understand what it means, what about the BMW would make him react that way.

“I don’t want to talk about that.”

“Okay. What do you want to talk about?”

“Is that what you came here to do? Talk?” Because they both know Adam came here for a reason, and he doesn’t have Persephone for an excuse this time.

What he came here to do seems impossible now with this combative Ronan. He came because he missed Ronan, the soft uncertain Ronan saying _You could, you know…anything you want._ He missed the way he felt here, with Ronan.

Adam feels too small in this house. Too small in front of this son, descended from Niall Lynch. Ronan feels like myth and Adam feels like soft flesh and brittle bone. He feels like the boy stumbling out of the fields onto the back road, a warm line of blood running from ear to jaw. Adam isn’t sure if he feels like this right now in front of Ronan solely because Ronan has seen him at his worst, or if he feels so frail because he is vulnerable right now.

“Then what?”

He plays with his tie. He doesn’t know what to say. 

“Are you going to kiss me again, Parrish?”

At his soft, questioning tone, a breath of relief washes through Adam. He moves forward into the space between Ronan’s legs, which widen for him. “Do you want me to?”

The line between Ronan’s eyebrows disappears. “What do you think, Genius?” Ronan drops his arms, hands falling to his legs.

Smiling, Adam says, “I’ll take that as a yes.”

"Conceited. Arrogant. Fishing for praise. I am disgusted, Parrish." 

Laughing and generously not pointing out the tremor in Ronan’s voice, Adam answers, "Okay, Lynch." He brings his hands up to Ronan’s neck, thumbs grazing the sharp line of his jaw. His knees turn to jelly just as Ronan leans into his touch. When he closes the distance between them, Ronan gasps into his mouth. Adam would be worried it was too much for Ronan except that he feels the exact same, this overwhelming rush stealing his breath from him.

When they part, Ronan looks down but their mouths are still just a breath apart. “I thought your experiment was over.”

“This isn’t an experiment.”

Ronan looks back up at him, knowing he can trust no one but himself to tell the truth, and sees Adam’s honesty for himself.

He dives at Adam, experimentally opening his mouth. Adam’s response is ruthless. Ronan doesn’t mind. Their mouths are more voracious with each passing second. Ronan finally lifts his hands to touch him, sliding his hands along Adam’s sides and up over his ribs until settling them on his hips. Carefully, Adam presses in, pinning Ronan, and his body has never felt so natural, so useful—no, purposeful as it does pressed up against Ronan’s.

“Can we take our clothes off?” asks Ronan.

After a stunned breath full of possibility, Adam whispers, “You’re shakin’, Ronan.”

“I like your accent when you're not paying attention to hiding it,” Ronan says, out of breath like he is cold.

Adam very much likes the combination of those words and the rumble of Ronan's voice in his chest beneath Adam’s hand as he says it, low and gravelly into his hearing ear. And his body likes it too, especially with Ronan’s thumb grazing the skin above his belt—his shirt has become untucked at some point. He backs up before Ronan can feel how desperate he is for the contact.

“Where you going, Parrish?” Ronan smile is shy, reaching out half-heartedly to Adam, and Adam had never seen anything so magnificent as that face that looked made for war actually made for smiling like…beauty, and joy, and rapture.

Knowing he could make Ronan Lynch smile felt as charged as signing his name to gain his freedom. Persephone, his caseworker at the time, had told him how he could emancipate himself. It was only later she’d asked if she could adopt him. Asked him. As though he had multiple applicants for the position. In that moment, he’d felt, for the first time, like he was the master of his own fate. She had given him his agency back. But this was beyond even that. This was raw power.

Later, Adam will wonder why he always thinks of Persephone when he’s with Ronan. Besides the obvious that Adam has been able to get to know Ronan because of Persephone. He realizes it’s because he’s happy. Both of these people make him happy. Light. Weightless. Cared for. He is trying to create a life away from Henrietta, but he is creating something here already.

“Come here, let me show you this story.”

“Is that the line, nowadays?”

“You’ll have to tell me. You know this is the first time—” Ronan breaks off, looking mad, a little wary.

Adam grabs his arm before he can stalk away to sit on the couch. “Ronan,” he says, voice soft, and Ronan turns his way but doesn’t look at him. “It’s okay. I like that I’m the first person who ever got to kiss you.” He trails his thumb over Ronan’s bottom lip, eliciting an unsteady inhale. He is fixated on Ronan’s mouth, the pliancy of that lip, the submission in Ronan’s expression. “I _really_ like it.”

Ronan nods, nervous again.

They sit on the couch, so close they are touching from ankle to hip. Adam tries to read the story, but Ronan won’t stop kissing his neck. When Adam can’t pretend to pay attention to the book anymore, he sets it down and looks at Ronan trying to decide what to do. There are so many things he wants to do. Adam’s got his fingers over his lips, trying to get himself under control. The way Ronan is looking at him is driving him insane.

“I've got a free house on Saturday. You can come over then if you wanted to.”

“Your house?” Ronan takes his hand, holds it up so that he can thread the fingers of his other hand through Adam’s.

“Yeah.”

Then he pulls Adam’s fingers into his mouth.

“Oh my _God,_ Lynch.” Adam practically climbs onto Ronan, leaning over him on the couch. Adam is sure this looks far less graceful than it does in movies.

“Are you sure we can’t take our clothes off?” Ronan can barely speak, and Adam knows it has less to do with him being on top of Ronan—Ronan outweighs him by at _least_ 20 pounds of muscle—and more to do with the erection he can no longer hide from Adam.

Adam pulls back, laughing and light headed. Ronan Lynch _wants_ him. He leans back, covering his eyes with his arm. Ronan clenches his shoulder in an encouraging way. Adam’s mouth quirks in a helpless smile. “We can’t. I said I'd take Persephone to this…” He waves his hand because he can’t think of the word.

“Pet store. Christmas tree lot. Rodeo!” 

“No,” Adam laughs and pushes him. “Thrift store.” Ronan catches his hand and inspects it. Then he kisses his knuckles, right where they’re the knobbiest and cracked. Adam sighs. He has no idea how he can have this many nerves in his hands. When Ronan opens his mouth, trailing his tongue down, sucking the inside of his wrist, Adam didn’t know it was possible that those nerves had a straight link to his dick but there it was. He was losing his shit.

When Ronan finishes, he inspects the rose bud he left at the bend of Adam's wrist, before looking up, eyes intense and burning.

“Can’t have you forgetting this, Parrish.”

Adam looks at his wrist too. Then at the boy beside him. "It would have to be a concerted effort," he says, breathless.

They sit, looking at a fireplace with a golden mirror on the mantel that looks like it's from the 19th century. Adam rubs his chin, pressing his other starving hand into his rib.

“You were tempted,” comes Ronan’s voice from behind him.

“No.” But he’s grinning.

“The temptation of Adam, first man. I tempted you.”

Adam looks at his hand. The hand Ronan has kissed, the fingers Ronan had in his mouth. Ronan Lynch has worlds inside of him. He glances back. “You'll come on Saturday?”

Ronan nods looking at his knees. Adam gets up and ducks his head, rubbing his tie between his fingers. He doesn’t bother tucking his shirt back in. Ronan watches him walk out the door into the cool dark hallway.

***

Ronan grabs a beer. Not to try and forget but to hold onto the feeling of air under wings, of an engine growling in his heart. Mostly though, he gets it, because Declan isn’t here. He comes back into the family room, the excavation of his father’s stories no longer calling. He settles into the window seat, bare feet crossed in front of him, elbows hanging off knees. He takes a drink, looking over the soaked fields beyond the drive.

He can’t stop touching his mouth. He can’t believe he had Adam Parrish’s hands in his mouth. Urgency pools through him. He takes a long draw from the bottle. Thankfully, he’s not doing anything as idiotic as smiling to himself when Matthew ambles in. 

“Declan said to ask you how was school.”

“You can tell Declan, fuck off.”

“But _you_ told me not to fucking swear. Woops! Eff off. Noted. Oh cool!” he rushes over to the couch. “Is this the one with the story about the chicken?”

Ronan has grudgingly left his post as a buzzed, ridiculously pleased gargoyle but stops on his way to the couch. “The chicken.”

“Yeah! You know. The chicken!”

Matthew picks up the book, and, for a moment, Ronan is as concerned as Declan usually is about the potential for grubby prints. He settles next to Matthew, bewildered, but unwilling to disappoint him. Matthew sees his face and slaps him on his back.

“Come on, Pal—ope, careful,” he says good naturedly, when Ronan almost spills his beer. “You have to remember. Let me just find it…”

They quickly realize that the story Matthew is thinking of is The Little Red Hen, which is not in their father’s volume of Irish folktales book.

That night, Adam calls. Ronan answers.

“Okay, now that you’re not _distracting_ me, tell me one of the stories in your book.” He sounds like he’s getting comfortable in bed.

“What book?”

“That folktale book I found for you.”

“ _You_ found for me? Jeez Parish. Everything is all about you.”

So Ronan tells him the story of the Greywaren who can pull things from his dreams. Ronan does not say he dreamed of Adam’s elegant, calloused hands, and somehow, brought that dream into reality. 

The next day, between periods, Adam steps up next to where Ronan is already leaning, (waiting to see him) listening to his music. When he reaches up to open his locker, he purposely exposes the wrist Ronan had against his mouth yesterday. It feels like days ago. It feels like an hour ago. Seeing the hickey there, knowing Adam will walk around with it all day under his sleeve, makes it feel like his lips are still pressed to his skin.

Adam gives him a quick, private smile that _undoes_ him. He was so fucked. 


	6. I've done the math enough to know the dangers of our second-guessing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok. I know I warned the last chapter was long and indulgent and full of fluff. But THIS is the fluff and sexy times we've all been waiting for. Honestly, I was so uncertain about this chapter for plot progression navigational reasons and how self indulgent it is, I wasn't even sure if I should continue the fic. So that fact that you are here, continuing to read something that is getting more difficult to write, knowing what I am leading up to, means the world. Thank you for all of your comments. They are truly life-giving as I try to get my original fiction out into the world behind the scenes. As a token of my appreciation, click back over to chapter 1 for fanart I did for this fic. :) 
> 
> Also, sexy times be ahead. They are pretty much unavoidable in this crossover. I added dominant/submissive behavior to the tags (and changed the rating to explicit) because it came very naturally with this Adam and Ronan. You may feel differently. I'm curious to hear what you think. 
> 
> This is a long one for your wait time. I've spent a thousand years obsessing over it and tweaking it. I hope you all love it.
> 
> Song title from Schism by Tool

Adam sits on the floor of his bedroom in a square of light from the window that warms his back. From the corner of is eyes, he catches the shadows of his plants. He cannot take his eyes off the letter in front of him. An acceptance letter. Georgetown. He cannot take his eyes away, because he already doesn’t believe what he’s seeing. But also…he does.

Ever since he moved in with Persephone, he struggled between two sides of himself. There was his past and his present life that he contended with on a daily basis. But these two sides constantly warred within him about whether he was worth anything. The psychologist Persephone had him see when he was still in the home and for a little while after the adoption told him that his abuse trained him to question his value. That it would take a very long time to overcome thoughts of not being enough, never being enough, never being worth anything. So as he sat here looking at his acceptance letter, he pushed down the side of himself that said ‘no, this isn’t possible. You, Adam Parrish, couldn’t have achieved this. You’re nothing. They’ve made a mistake. You weren’t meant to receive this letter. You weren’t meant for this.’ He tells himself in his head, over and over again, _you worked for this. You earned this. You_ are _worth it._

He’s not ready to tell Persephone yet, even though she undoubtedly saw the letter. She knows it holds an answer regarding his future. Or…actually, she would say regarding the choice he has to make. He doesn’t know if he could be so far from her. But he’s also excited at the idea of being so far from everything, of starting over. He stands up and grabs his jacket. Through the windows, the sky promises rain.

“Adam?” Ronan stands in the door, looking better than Adam remembered him looking the last time he walked out of here. He also looks as though he’s forgotten what Adam looked like in the last 24 hours. Or maybe it was because he is half-soaked from the walk up to the house. Ronan’s face breaks into a smile and Adam realizes he feels relieved. Would he ever stop feeling like he was misinterpreting this? Like Ronan was going to turn him away and tell them he had it all wrong. He wasn’t allowed to touch Ronan like that, to like him like that.

“I would have texted, but I wanted to actually see you today. Not three days from now.”

Ronan smirked then looked in earnest at Adam, hope and something else warring in his expression.

“Is this okay?”

“Fuck. _Yes._ Get in here, shithead.”

He slips his jacket off as he comes in, tossing it on the well-worn coat rack. As Ronan reaches behind him to close the door, Adam slides his hands along Ronan’s neck. His mouth falls onto Ronan’s open, waiting one. Everything about him is liquid heat.

_How is this real. How is this real. Persephone. Georgetown. And now this?_

Ronan reaches for Adam’s hand, fingers coming over the back of it and between his. It grounds Adam, reminds him there is more to this moment than mouth and teeth and tongue and heat. Ronan doesn’t seem interested in anything aside from that as he leads Adam upstairs to his room, and leans against it to close it. Adam crowds him against it.

“Did you mean it?”

“What?”

“What you said about doing anything I want. To you.”

If Ronan’s dick is anything to go by, the answer is yes. “You can do anything to me, Parrish.”

Adam presses closer to him. “God, how do you just say things like that?”

“Like what? The truth?” Ronan’s voice sounds shaky again.

“I don’t want—I know I said Saturday, but—”

“Wanna get on the bed?”

Adam nods.

Ronan tosses himself back on it, scooting up. Adam sits down on the edge. He is so used to picking everything apart. He analyzes and weighs. Ronan saw that right from the start. But right now, with this, he cannot _think._ His entire body buzzes and rings. It makes him a little afraid, that he cannot gather his thoughts about this. All he knows to do when he can’t analyze something because he is too close to the situation is to step back. He tells himself he’s gathering his composure.

He picks up a toy car from the nightstand. It looks just like a toy he’d seen a kid with at school, a toy he remembers feeling the fiercest most insurmountable desire for. He rolls ones of the wheels. It plays a tune. Of course. Of course this toy car exists in this house with Ronan Lynch.

“Adam?”

His voice sounds so uncertain. Adam sets the car down, looks back. Ronan is on his elbows, watching him. He looks the way Adam felt when he arrived. Like he isn’t sure that they’re allowed this. But there is nothing to stop them. Adam turns, puts his knee on the bed and crawls over Ronan.

He loses his nerve at the last and lays beside Ronan. Kissing is great. Kissing Ronan is fucking wonderful. Adam feels like he could fuel a rocket on a mission to the moon. Ronan’s hand slips under the hem of his T-shirt. Adam gasps into his mouth as Ronan presses his thumb into the dip right above his hipbone, before pulling their hips flush, igniting him.

“Is it okay?”

“Yes,” Ronan says into his mouth.

Adam pulls back, looking at Ronan, lashes fanning over his blissed out, icy stare.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fucking fine, Parrish.”

“We just went from your first kiss to…”

“Dry humping?”

“Nice, Ronan,” Adam says laughing, because otherwise his embarrassment would render him mute. He trails his hand up Ronan’s side, over his back, imagining the tattoo under it. He worries about Ronan going too far with Adam and regretting it. He has seen the cross above the door and other small totems of Catholicism throughout the house.

“Your brain never shuts the fuck up, does it?” Ronan licks up the side of his neck.

“You’re doing a pretty fair job of shutting it up— _aaaahhh_ —right now.”

“Good. Shut mine up then.”

“Tell me what you’re thinking about first.”

Ronan scoffs, low in his ear, his hand creeping higher up the front of Adam’s shirt. Adam’s skin breaks out in goosebumps. “What is this? A share circle? I’m not going to tell you about my feelings.”

“I asked you to tell me your thoughts, not your feelings.” At some point, Ronan has moved on top of Adam.

His slides a hand up Ronan’s shirt, wanting skin. After a moment of consideration, he runs his other hand over Ronan’s ass, thumb pressing down a little harder in the center, slow and cautious, but he feels _voracious_. Ronan gasps, arching against him. “I think I know what your feelings are right now.”

“My thoughts are that…Fuck, I can’t do this with you touching me like that.”

Adam carefully holds his waist, before rearranging them so that he is laying on top of Ronan now. They let out a simultaneous breath. Ronan looks a little stunned by Adam’s maneuver. Slowly, he lifts Ronan’s hands above his head and holds them there, clasping Ronan’s wrists.

“What about now?” asks Adam.

Ronan’s legs come around his hips, pulling him closer in answer. He never stops looking Adam right in the eyes, full of awe and fire. This is foreplay.

“I thought you were untouchable,” Adam says, trying to control his voice. “To have you like this, all open for me, it feels like I’m on fire.”

“You’re going to fucking kill me, Parrish.”

“That is so far from my intentions.”

Ronan stares at him for one piecing moment, then looks off to the side.

“Where do you even see this going?” Ronan asks, and Adam watches color rise on his neck. “You’re done with me after Saturday and then find someone else? Like, I just want to be prepared.”

“What? Damn, Ronan. _No_.” He rolls off of Ronan who looks over at him.

Despite how ashamed he is that Ronan could think that of him, he wants to explain. He understands that Ronan is both a stubborn shit and a guy who has never been with anyone, so he tries to keep his anger in check. “I had no idea what this was coming into it, but I promise I’m not taking it lightly. Okay?”

“Okay.” Ronan stares up at the ceiling. Adam stares up at the ceiling too, starts trailing the callused tips of his fingers down Ronan’s arm and to his palm, which opens for him. He traces there and moves up to touch the same part of his wrist where Ronan marked Adam’s. His fingers find those bumps again on his wrist and up his arm, and Adam realizes what he’s feeling suddenly. His fingers tracing the scars deliberately now. Ronan lets him pick up his arm to examine them. Adam presses his thumb under the black leather straps around Ronan’s wrist.

“It was the only thing I could feel after dad died.”

He thinks of all the times he had seen Ronan walking down the halls nose bloody—he had a straight Greek nose that was as prominently featured as his eyes and wide heavy mouth that bore a smile made for war—that is to say it was bound to be injured if a fist was flying at his face. Ronan had never cared. Now Adam understands the correlation between the pain of grief and physical pain: one mutes the other. 

“You don’t…now?”

Ronan turns and a tear slips out of the corner of his eye and disappears between his cheek and the comforter. “No. I haven’t in a long time.”

Adam is so relieved to hear this, he actually can’t speak. Instead, he runs his fingers up Ronan’s arm, to his shoulder to his neck, making him shiver. Ronan stares into his eyes, and Adam stares back.

When they hear his brothers coming down the drive, Ronan takes Adam down to the kitchen to eat. Adam acts shy when Matthew and Declan come through the door, saying hi, but otherwise turning his attention elsewhere as they greet Ronan. When they leave the kitchen, he turns back to Adam, gauging his malfunction.

“Why’d you get weird?”

“I didn’t get weird.”

“Whatever. You want cereal?”

“Sure.”

He used to think Adam watched him eat, because he wasn’t eating enough. Pride or some shit, Ronan thought. But as he watches Ronan pour cereal straight from the box into his mouth and chase it with milk straight from the gallon (while Adam eats his civilized bowl of cereal and milk), Ronan understands that the look he has is a different kind of hunger. It makes food that much more satisfying.

Ronan performs the feat of maintaining a smirk while he chews, swallowing in a very showy manner. Adam puts down his bowl and crowds Ronan against the counter. 

“God, Lynch, your mouth.”

Ronan’s smirk is now taking over his entire face because he was right. _It knows other tricks_ goes through his mind.

“ _Your_ mouth,” he says, settling for mocking instead of suggestive. But he’s smiling as he knocks Adam’s hand away. Adam tries again to pinch his other side. Ronan puts his knee up, but Adam’s faster and catches his unguarded side.

“Fucker,” Ronan laughs, reaching out for payback, but Adam catches his wrists and puts them behind his back, closing in on him. Ronan lets him.

Declan clears his throat. Adam startles back.

“Adam, I think you should go. I need to speak with my brother.”

Adam stares coldly at Declan. He looks alien, vacant. Declan was a human male and Adam was…something else altogether. Internally, Ronan reveled. Finally someone to beat Declan at his own bland-faced game.

Ronan wants to ignore that his brother just saw them flirting, very nearly kissing, but he can’t. He’s tense everywhere, trying to keep the shaking at bay. When did he turn into such a mess? But then again, it’s not unlike the tremor he feels when he knows he’s about to drive with the windows down at night, the bass so heavy it vibrates his cells, and he is very familiar with that feeling and how to handle it—you ride it.

Adam looks to Ronan to make sure that’s what he wants.

“See you tomorrow,” he says, confirming.

After Adam leaves, the house is quiet except for Matthew singing the high parts of Mingulay Boat Song on the upper floor. It uncomfortably reminds Ronan of the day he was singing Golden Slumbers to their mother.

Declan moves to put the milk back in the fridge. He closes it, then thinks again and opens it, before noting something on a list he keeps in the drawer next to the fridge.

He turns around, and leans against the counter, crossing his arms. “Ronan. What are you doing?”

Ronan glares at him, feeling hatred for the words Declan hasn’t even said yet, for the truth that Ronan knows lies behind them. Declan was only a year ahead of them; he would know Adam’s reputation. That mythical combination of jock and academic—popular. But everyone also saw the other part of Adam he couldn’t quite hide. The cold remove that came from watching afar for so long and trying to blend into your environment. Ronan hung out with a raven though, so what the fuck did he care about having a chameleon for a boyfriend.

“Don’t tell me it’s Adam.”

“Fine.”

“ _Ronan.”_

“Is this all you fucking came in here to talk to me about. Because in case you couldn’t tell, I was busy.”

Declan stares at him for a moment. “No. If anyone comes to the door you don’t recognize, don’t answer it.”

“Okay, do I want them to know I’m home or not home when I don’t answer?”

“Do whatever you want to scare them off. Maybe we can find some good audio of a dog barking.”

Ronan scoffs.

“Or we could just get a dog,” Matthew says coming down the stairs and resuming his song with nary a breath between.

Declan and Ronan freeze as Matthew walks past them and pulls out the milk Declan just put away. Ronan has no idea why Declan is telling him not to answer the door for strangers like he’s two, but Declan doesn’t overreact. Well, he doesn’t overreact about anything except Ronan. And neither of them would want Matthew to know they’re having this conversation. One of them is always home with him anyway. It’s been an unspoken agreement between them since Mattie was born—unspoken by either of them because Niall or Aurora would always bark it at them (“Don’t leave your brother alone”, “Watch your brother”, “Take your brother with you”).

They watch, per their parents’ constant behest, as Matthew sets the milk on the counter, takes off the cap, and pours the cereal straight into his mouth. He chases it with a drink of milk straight from the carton. Declan levels an accusing scowl at Ronan. Ronan’s eyes roll in the equivalent of a defensive shrug.

When Matthew finishes, he wipes his forearm across his mouth. “Why are we talking about getting a dog?”

“We’re not.” Declan stalks back to the fridge and snatches the milk off the counter to put it in its rightful place. 

“Okay, guys.” Matthew says, putting his hands up, backing out of the kitchen. “I can see when I’m not wanted. I’ll be in here, playing Rainbow Six. I’m just saying…”

“Get it loaded up,” Ronan tells him over Declan’s shoulder. “I’ll be in there in a second.”

“Yes!” Matthew hisses, disappearing around the corner.

“Keep your phone on you, too,” Declan says.

“You’re seriously not going to tell me what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“I’m handling it.”

“Whatever.”

Just before Ronan leaves the kitchen, Declan calls him. He turns back.

“Whatever you’re doing with him, it isn’t what you think it is.”

Ronan feels a sudden wave of vertigo, of nausea. He wants to ask _what the fuck do you know._ He wants to punch Declan’s teeth down his throat.

"Parrish won’t stay for you. His future is more important than anyone in his present.”

Declan’s feet are braced shoulder-width apart, as though he’s waiting for Ronan to dive at him. But if he allows himself to lash out, he’d be proving Declan right. He’d be laying his fear out there. That used to be the only way they communicated. Fighting like dogs. For a coveted scrap of their dad’s attention, for his jovial shouts of encouragement. But their dad was buried at St. Agnes in their family mausoleum. It would just be depressing to fist fight now. Or maybe it was that Ronan could never forget Declan’s face in the hospital.

“Thanks, Man,” he says calmer than he thought himself capable of. Feeling ill down to his core, he stalks out to the living room.

He takes the controller Matthew holds up to him and he walks past him and throws himself shoulder first into the couch. He remembers, only half an hour ago, throwing himself back on his bed. Adam Parrish looking down at him. _Of course I can’t have this,_ he thinks. But he _did_ have it. _Does._

After a second shitty campaign, Matthew backs out of the match. Ronan glares at the screen, still holding his controller.

“Dec’s just worried about you getting hurt.”

“That is not why he’s giving me shit about Adam.”

Matthew looks contemplative before blinking and returning to the screen, starting up another match. “Sometimes you two are so dense about each other. I don’t get it.”

Later, Ronan pisses as Matthew brushes his teeth. After, Ronan rans a hand over his head, wondering if he should shave it again.

Matthew spits and turns to him. “What are we going to do about, Mom?”

“I don’t know.”

“But what do you think we should do?”

“I don’t think we really have a choice."

“But the doctor said we’d have to make one.”

“Yes. Matthew. We’d have to make the only one there is.” They look at one another through the mirror. Matthew is soft in all the ways Ronan is jagged. Ronan loves him so much it wants to tear out of him and shatter the mirror, explode through the ceiling, and blacken the sky. “To let her go,” he says. If he was in Mattie’s shoes and Declan was in his, he would want Declan to give it to him straight. But seeing Declan tell the truth would be like watching a unicorn shit rainbows. Primarily improbable because unicorns didn’t exist to begin with.

Maybe the way Matthew’s chin crumples is the exact reason Declan wouldn’t share his honest thoughts on something like this with Matthew.

“But… we should give her more time. Shouldn’t we?”

Before he says something terrible, Ronan slams the medicine cabinet he’d opened for no reason. “I’m going to bed,” he says and leaves, because he can’t lie, and the words _everything dies, Matthew_ is too close to the edge of his tongue.

Ronan can’t sleep. He lays in bed, moon and night coming through the naked window, while Chainsaw, a nocturnal creature hops around his bed and on his person. He tears little pieces of paper from his physics homework and crumples them into balls for her. She happily chases them, until, eventually, she grows indignant about the simplicity of the game and hops right on his diaphragm with all her considerable weight—he had not been prepared for how fast she would grow. To show he is annoyed with her, he stuffs the rest of the handout beneath him and puts his hands under his head.

She hops around the room, still indignant but curious. His phone vibrates against the floor. He hopes it annoys the fuck out of Declan who made the stupid rule that he needs to keep it on him. And even though he groans because he has to move to reach it, his stomach flips because he knows it’s Adam.

 **Parrish** 11:21 PM: _The team will be at the fundraiser event Friday to help sell prom tickets. Would there be any version of you that might come?_

He wanted Ronan to come to one of his yuppie Aglionby events?

 **Parrish** 11:23 PM: _Sorry. I just realized how late it was._

He couldn’t help but think— _remember_ everything that happened today, right here on his bed _._ His chest rose faster as he replayed over and over Adam’s hands securing him, keeping him safe, taking what he wanted, which was _impossibly_ Ronan. He _wants_ Ronan to be there. Declan is wrong about this.

 **Ronan** 11:23 PM: let me check my schedule

His eyes snag on one of his uniform ties strung over his closet door. Already dislodged from his comfy position, he stands. He walks to the closet. He pulls the tie down slowly. It scratches over the bare wood edge. He pools it into his hand, then pulls it taut. His pulse flutters like a hummingbird’s as he puts the tie into his pocket.

On the night of the fundraiser (one night before Ronan is supposed to come over to Adam’s house for _more_ ), Adam strolls into the hotel. He feels like it’s a little over the top, with the neon lights and alcohol very obviously being served to minors. But he wasn’t the event coordinator, or thank god, parent to any of these assholes.

“Hey, Parrish!” His friends congregate in the shadows away from the dance floor. This thing is, ridiculously, a pre-prom. He is not surprised that he does not see Ronan glowering from any corner yet, but he still feels a sliver of disappointment.

“Look at this stud,” Eric yells over the music. “What’s up with that look on your face? Like you just ate the bird.”

“You mean like ‘the cat with the canary’?”

“What?”

“Nothing. I’m just in a good mood.”

“Jesus, Eric. You’re acting gay,” Tad says, only loud enough for the three of them to hear. These kind of insults were exchanged with more discretion. It would be undue for two promising students of Aglionby to be engaging in such insensitive language.

“Oh, fuck off,” says Eric. He is not one of the promising students.

“Besides, everyone knows I’d be Parrish’s first choice, anyway.”

Adam notices the girls, Rachel and Emerson, looking. 

“Ask me to prom, Adam!” Tad drapes an arm on him.

Normally Adam would just write this off, but now that he’s been kissing a boy, he feels himself get hot with embarrassment.

“No homo. Ah, look! He’s blushing.” Tad pinches his cheek.

Adam pushes him off. “Come on, Tad.”

“I knew you liked me too, Parrish.” Tad’s exuberance makes Adam wonder if he got drunk before coming.

They’re actually having a good night. Adam feels impossibly buoyant. He feels more like himself than ever, except every time he wants to tell them what Ronan thinks about something, or what he said regarding that, he has to clamp his jaw. They have no idea he even talks to Ronan, that Ronan even talks to anyone outside school, that Ronan _likes_ Adam. Ronan never answered whether he was coming or not.

Everything feels a little dreamy as he thinks about how easily Ronan laid back and let Adam have control, how he wrapped his legs around Adam—

“So, Adam,” Rachel asks, interrupting his thoughts, which were tending toward X rated.

“Hey, Rachel. How are you?”

“Good. Can I buy one of your tickets?”

“Oh, sure,” Adam says, setting his cup of water down on the bar and pulling out the roll of tickets from his coat pocket. “I’m surprised you haven’t gotten one already.” He pulls one off. He’s grateful he doesn’t have to say the ridiculous price aloud when she just hands him two twenties. After stuffing the tickets away, he pulls out the small money bag, conscious of everyone knowing—seeing—that he was selling tickets, not taking money from people for nothing. Aglionby gave one to each person on the soccer team, football team, and cheerleading team. Adam made sure that the bag was always turned so the crest faced out.

When he looks back up, Rachel looks puzzled.

“Just one, right?” he asks. He has always felt strange speaking to girls, even though he was considered popular now. Or maybe because he was a rangy hyena in a herd of gazelles. He always felt like an imposter.

“Yeah. Thanks, Adam. Listen—”

But Adam wasn’t listening. He sees one of the hotel lobby’s double doors open, and Ronan, immediately finding Adam with his hard gaze, blocks out everything else. He’s got his guard up that Adam is slowly getting beneath and behind in private. Adam is proud he gets to see the other side of Ronan, see how his face softens when they clock Adam amid the crowd.

He walks right up to Adam, and Adam feels his entire body get hot as Ronan gets close for too many reasons. But thankfully everyone else has drifted away. He’s caught Adam alone. The flashing colored lights bounce off both of them as they stare at each other.

“Can I buy a ticket from you?”

Adam swallows. “Yeah. Of course.”

“Actually, give me 5.”

“Ronan. That’s $200.”

“Yeah. And it’s a fucking fundraiser, right?”

Adam shakes his head, torn between a smile and grimace. “Like you care about raising money for the prom or Feed America.”

“I happen to care a lot about the hungry.”

Adam looks up at Ronan because he genuinely cannot tell if he’s serious. He bursts out laughing when Ronan’s earnest face gives away nothing.

A smile pulls the corner of Ronan’s wicked mouth up. “There. Now you can tell all your loser friends you won the fundraiser.”

“That’s not—” Adam huffs, but Ronan turns away to go to the bar and his hand brushes Adam’s. No one could have possibly seen but Adam fears his reaction is quite noticeable. He reaches for the bar and picks up his water, taking a drink.

He watches Ronan drop the tickets into the trash can on his way to get a drink. He sees Ronan pull out his phone, and receives a text.

 **Ronan** 9:47 PM: _Want anything?_

 **Adam** 9:47 PM: _I don’t think you can do anything about that here._

He watches Ronan read it, zeroes in on the rise of his chest. Ronan turns his hypothermic eyes on Adam, tugging him low in his belly.

Eric suddenly appears at his side, gratingly loud in his good ear. “Tried scoring a beer but he asked for my ID. Prick.”

Tad laughs at Eric over his vape pen as he takes a drag and lets out a dense cloud of sweet smoke that makes spit unpleasantly build up in Adam’s saliva glands.

Ronan appears, handing a bottle to Eric. Eric looks at him like a dog has just stood on its hind legs and started talking. “That’s because your balls haven’t dropped.”

Eric looks like he wants to say something shitty. Adam and Tad are quiet for very different reasons, Adam supposes. Adam is mostly surprised that Ronan is being nice to his friends.

“Take it before I change my mind. I haven’t had any of it yet.”

Eric takes it. “How will you maintain your delinquent image though?”

“Image,” Tad and Ronan both scoff. They look at each other and, impossibly, Tad laughs. Ronan offers a begrudging smile. Eric looks annoyed. His jealousy is visibly from space. He produces a flask from his jacket and hands it off to Tad.

“I can’t drink that shit anymore after spring break last year.”

“WILLIE WEASLE!” Tad yells, and everyone on the team, spread out throughout the lobby, yells it back. Ronan exchanges a humorous glance with Adam. 

Eric mocks their laughter. Maybe he also got drunk before they came.

Tad passes the flask to Adam after he takes a drink. Adam takes a drink and hands it to Ronan. If Ronan takes a drink, it is the closest their mouths will be in front of everyone.

Ronan stares right at him, making sure Adam knows he’s doing this because Adam wants him to. Then he takes a long pull, showing off his neck. Adam’s mouth goes dry.

“Did he threaten you, Adam?”

Adam can’t correlate the words to the situation for a moment—to Ronan’s beautiful neck (he actually thought that adjective. _Beautiful!),_ Ronan’s steady gaze burning everything else away. Then he processes what Eric means and has that feeling again, that he was surrounded by actual apes. It comes in like a wave and washes through him with prickling realization.

“Parrish has nothing to fear from me,” Ronan says, and Adam thinks that if he keeps looking at him like that, everyone is going to know.

“I didn’t say the bastard could have any,” Eric says.

“You’re literally drinking the beer he gave you,” says Tad, sounding bored.

Adam decides they were definitely getting fucked up together before coming.

“What did you call me?”

They all look at Ronan, who looks murderous. Eric tries to chug the whole beer to show that he’s not shitting his pants, but Tad and Adam look at each other trying to decide how stupid he is right now.

“That’s what you call someone with no parents, right?”

“Fuck you,” says Ronan. He sounds so much more dangerous when he’s not angry.

“Fuck you,” says Eric, pushing Ronan. Ronan catches his arm and throws it away from him. Adam wants to move forward, to pull Ronan back, out of harm, but he is frozen by the abrupt movements, the simmering rage.

Eric pulls back and punches Ronan, before immediately retracting his arm. “Shit! My wrist.”

It could have stopped there. But Ronan shoulders Eric in his middle, taking him to the ground. No one expected it.

Adam sees Ronan is mostly just overpowering Eric, but he can’t help the way his ear prickles when he hears someone say he’s a fucked up psycho. He can’t help but think about how Ronan has seemed coiled since he arrived, he’d just made the mistake of thinking it was because he was holding himself back from Adam. But it was so very clear he never wanted to be here.

For nearly a week, it had been so perfect. They had been such a contained world, the awareness of each other crackling between them, eyes and skin and shaking breaths, explorers thoroughly charting entirely new continents. He should have known it was an unstable planet, that it couldn’t last when the atmosphere was pierced and the real world poured back in.

“He tried to kill himself.”

Adam actually tears his eyes away from the scuffle to look at Rachel. His blood is pounding in his ears, behind his eyes. He doesn’t know what to do.

Professor Gray easily steps in and pulls Ronan off of Eric by his shoulders. “Gentlemen, this is a school event,” he says, voice mild. Adam feels like his response is too light for the situation, but he’s grateful all the same.

Ronan throws Gray’s hand off his shoulder, glares down at Eric who definitely looks afraid now. Adam hates his fear but also hates the way he treated Ronan. When he stalks off, Adam says he’s going to head out. It makes him sick, physically ill to be in the same place as his friends right now.

He can see the trail Ronan left glowing on the ground, a neon path leading right to him. He feels the familiar panic, to claw out of his own skin, to hide, to escape, to be in pain and fear and die alone. He puts his hand on the door, hopes his friends have stopped watching him, and takes a breath. For a startling moment, he wishes he had his cards with him, that he could pull one here. He felt like he had a choice coming, and he just wants to know— _is this it?_

When he opens the door, Ronan is wiping a paper towel over his face. “I don’t need a babysitter.”

Normally Adam would say _the evidence points to the contrary._ But he’s on Ronan’s side. Eric has been a dick to him since he got here. “That’s not why I’m here.”

Ronan wipes the back of his neck with the paper towel. “Shit, Parrish, your eyes. You look like you’re going to have a coronary.”

“I’m just worried about you.”

“You should be worried about Doyle’s pencil wrist.” He laughs, viciously. Adam recognizes it as the same explosive tension Ronan carried before they started talking, being friends. Ronan recognizes it as the pre-night driving feeling, the feeling he tries to scratch with a twelve pack. With the punching bag on the back porch. With Adam’s mouth, Adam’s voice, Adam’s _hands_ pressing him into a fog. To further cover his tracks, Ronan says, “They’re probably worrying about you in here with me.”

Adam stares at him, calculating, always calculating. Risk. Damage. Payoff.

“I’m going to follow you home.”

Ronan is surprised for a moment. The payoff is worth the risk. _He_ is worth it to Adam. “Fuck you, Parrish.” Further coverage of his tracks.

Adam takes his arm before he can walk out, halting Ronan in his tracks. He stares down at the ground.

“Ronan.”

Ronan counts the tiles between their feet. Two and half tiles between them. Adam is wearing shoes he’s never seen before, some fancy dress shoes that look like he definitely borrowed them from Tad. The impossible thought of Adam asking anyone for anything makes Ronan want to punch a stall door off the hinges.

“ _Ronan._ ” He locks the door behind them. Ronan finally looks at him.

Adam slides his hand up Ronan’s clavicle, his thumb laying right over his Adam’s apple. Ronan swallows—he can’t help it. He feels Adam’s control over him condensed down to that one pressure point against his skin. Not like a controlling boyfriend way, but a boneless, hazy washing away of every thought. It is the most welcome sensation he has ever experienced.

“I’m following you home.”

Ronan nods.

When they get to Ronan’s, they get out of their separate cars. Adam doesn’t ask if he’s okay, just pushes Ronan up against the BMW and claims his mouth.

“Thank you for coming. I’m sorry my friends are shit.”

“Smalls price to be with you, I guess.”

Adam presses him harder into the BMW, kisses him again. As Ronan’s arms come around his neck, Adam’s hands find his sides, clutch at the back of his shirt under his jacket.

Adam says against his lips, “You’re still coming over tomorrow?”

“Been looking forward to it all week. You’re the one who can’t get enough of me and keeps coming over and inviting me to shit.” Ronan leans back, palms on the BMW.

“Whatever, asshole,” Adam says. He retracts his arms, but not before slipping a hand in Ronan’s pocket, pulling him closer by his pocket. As he bites the sharp edge of Ronan’s clavicle, finger brushing up against the hard length he feels there, Ronan’s breathing trips.

“Thanks for that,” Ronan growls, watching Adam back away, his pale eyes burning neon in the dark. “I’m never sleeping again."

Adam is laughing, feeling high as he gets into his car.

When he returns home, Persephone has her friends Maura and Calla over for their Friday night ritual of tarot and mixed drinks. There are random objects from the house littered on the round chipped glass table between them—cereal boxes and magazines, recipe print outs and playing cards. They all turn as one to look at Adam as he comes in. He’s used to their intense observation and finds it best not to engage. But he hears a giggle, and when he looks, finds that it was impossibly, Persephone.

“What?” he asks, immediately regretting the question.

She holds her cards in front of her mouth, turning her eyes back down to the table. Maura frowns at him.

“Your boy is _loud,_ Poldma!” Calla growls before tossing her card into the center of the mess.

Adam hurries to his room and closes the door behind him, face burning.

When Ronan arrives the next day, Adam is wearing a blue T-shirt and jeans. He looks so good Ronan wants to drop to his knees at the threshold. Instead he stands there, glowering in his leather jacket and black. Adam sees right through it. He smiles and takes Ronan’s hand, pulling him inside.

“Want a tour?”

“No.”

“Great.” Adam pulls him down the narrow hallway to his room. The door is open and it’s impossibly bright for 10 AM.

Adam follows him in, waiting, expectant, as Ronan looks around. This is where Adam Parrish sleeps. Standing there, looking at the plants on the window sills, he thinks he may have made a mistake in coming here. He had only ever smelled the wild spicy scent his father used, the expensive hint of his brother’s Burberry, and the jubilant abundance of Axe Mattie bathed in. So this, Adam’s cheap shampoo from a recent shower—his hair was still damp—and fuel from his jumpsuit somewhere in this room, and the herbs and soil, this smell was entirely uncharted territory. The combination was sexier than gasoline, and it made this suddenly very real.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” Adam says, echoing his thoughts. Ronan closes his eyes. His jaw hurts a little—it isn’t even bruised for fuck’s sake—but Adam’s voice burns everything else away.

“Why? You’ve been over to my place a shit ton of times.” He says it as though he doesn’t count each and every single time Adam has been to his home, even the times he didn’t see him, just knew he was out in the car, waiting, or chatting with Persephone in the kitchen and Ronan was too caught up in his head to come down and pretend to be fit for human company.

When Ronan turns Adam has moved to the bed, sitting on the edge.

“Because it means…there’s only one reason you’d be here. And it’s just impossible to imagine someone with your parents, where you from, can like me.” He spoke calmly, logically, but he's looking down at his hands pressed together between his knees.

“Where do I come from?”

“Love.”

Ronan thinks about Declan saying their dad cheated on mom all the time.

“You’re just going to ignore the part where I’m fucked up?” Ronan tries to act like it doesn’t bother him, as he walks closer to the plants, imagining Adam tending to them.

“What? Oh. No. I don’t care. People probably say that about me too.”

“No one ever says anything bad about you, Parrish. But I see the evil mastermind in there. Even though you never give an opinion about anything.”

“I have opinions. I know what I want.”

“Yeah?” Ronan turns to him.

Adam stands up and steps forward.

Ronan doesn’t move in. “Do you do this a lot? Going over to girls houses and seducing them.”

“That what you think of me, Lynch?”

But Adam doesn’t let him answer. Just drops his open mouth on Ronan’s and mercilessly takes control of his tongue. Ronan’s fingers brush against the tie in his pocket.

Adam couldn’t believe how good of a kisser Ronan was, being that Adam was the first person he’d ever kissed. He’d never been kissed so enthusiastically and unselfconsciously by any girls. He was good at slow, chasing ones that left you wanting more. Open, filthy ones. And completely destroying ones that took total control of Adam. Truthfully, he was lost in cataloging all of them, when Ronan pulled back, putting his mouth at Adam’s ear.

“You promised we’d take off our clothes.”

The depth of his voice, the roughness, slips straight through Adam.

“I did, didn’t I?” He slips his hands under the collar of Ronan’s leather jacket pushing it off of him in a hurry. The sound of it falling to the ground sounds sensuous, and jumpstarts them both. But still, Adam does not go any further.

“Well,” Ronan goads. “Carry on.”

Adam pulls Ronan’s shirt off and backs him into his bed. Ronan couldn’t be happier to comply. That itch inside of him is mercifully being scratched and scratched and all of his nerves feel sated and dazzling.

Ronan who has opened his eyes for just one look at Adam lost in the pleasure of their mouths at war, sees Adam’s tie on his desk chair. He tugs it so it slithers to the floor to be with his jacket.

"Actually, I never promised that."

"What?" Ronan's impatience and Adam's clear upperhand excites Adam. 

"I just said 'not here' when we were at your house."

Ronan looks genuinely furious. Adam knows the scowl is just a front. Thanks to his compliance, Adam can see his entire chest is red and his erection is still quite apparent. 

"So what, Parrish? Get naked."

Adam is sure that Ronan is only able to say these words because Adam is actually pissing him off. Weirdly, this excites Adam.

"Ah, ah, ah. I think you should be punished for fibbin'."

"I wasn't," Ronan sputters. "I thought--" he swallows. His eyes get darker suddenly, and his whole body loosens as he falls back on his elbows. "And what should my punishment be?"

"Here's the thing." Miraculously, he has already dreamed Ronan asking him this question. And the same response in his dream tumbles out of his mouth now. "You don't get to come until I tell you."

Ronan's chest rises and falls fast, but his smirk is cool. "And after? What's my reward if I..." he loses track as Adam pulls off his own T-shirt and throws it to the side. 

Suddenly, Adam doesn't care how much leaner and fine-boned he is than Ronan, how many scars he has, dented ribs. Adam cannot believe he gets to have this. Adam cannot believe he gets to have this. 

"If I'm good." Ronan finally chokes out. 

"See," Adam says, climbing onto the bed over Ronan. "That's not really how it works, Lynch. You're being punished for lying."

They both know he doesn't lie, but they're all too willing to play their parts in this game.

"However, I'm feeling _very_ generous," says Adam, dipping down to kiss right above Ronan's jeans and boxers. He can hear him gasp. He kisses all the way up his chest to Ronan's ear and pauses. "So, if you're good....your reward will be me letting you come."

"Fuck, Adam," Ronan says, voice cracking as he breaks character. 

Feeling heady and luxurious in his arousal and control, he kisses Ronan sweetly. Ronan speeds it up, uncontrollable. 

"I'm going to unbutton your pants," says Adam, breathing hard. 

Ronan nods, watching him steadily. Adam takes him out and strokes him. Ronan refuses to look down. He doesn't move at all, in fact. The excitement of the persona can't compete with Adam's concern about whether he is doing a good job. He likes to get things right thr first time. And he wants Ronan's first time to be good. "Is this okay?"

"Yes." Ronan glances down to where Adam is swiping his thumb over his head because Adam likes it wet when he does it to himself.

Ronan's hand shoots out to grab his wrist. "I won't be able to last if you keep doing that."

"Alright." It's only fair, Adam supposes, as he can barely hold himself together. 

"Can I touch you?" asks Ronan. 

Adam tries to decide how it fits into their game of control and thinks _fuck it._ He stands on his knees, unbuttons his jeans. He pushes himself down through his boxers before pushing all of his clothes down. 

"Fuck, Parrish."

"What?"

Ronan leans up on his elbow and takes Adam in his hand. Adam grabs his shoulder to steady himself. 

"This is every wet dream I am ever going to have again."

When Adam gets to his locker on Monday, Tad and Eric are talking about the fundraiser, studiously ignoring Ronan a couple feet down from Adam. Adam feels a slick sense of shame roll down his back as he buries his head in his locker. He was terrified Ronan would say something _Do any of you know how Parrish looks when he comes?_ He’s equally afraid of Eric or Tad saying something to Ronan to set him off again.

“What the fuck man?” Eric asks, pushing Adam’s back. His head knocks against the door of his locker. His eyes cut over to Ronan who has gone still before walking on. “You holding out on us? You had a free house on Saturday?”

Adam thinks for one moment how insane it would be to say, _yeah, but I was busy getting off with Ronan Lynch, the guy whose face you almost broke your hand on._

“I was just studying.”

“You’re such a beta, Adam.”

“Is that right?” Adam asks, giving no quarter.

“If that’s the case, Adam will be the beta with a lawyer’s salary and you’ll be working at Chick-fil-A. Don’t take it too hard, Eric. I hear they have really good insurance for their employees," says Tad.

He stares at Ronan in class. Thinking about the noises he makes. Thinking about how easily he lets Adam restrain him. Thinks of Ronan cussing teachers out and stalking down the halls in his boots and his famine blue eyes. And how he keens for Adam, how he arches under Adam’s touch and command. It turns him on, right there in the middle of class. At this point he is made up of at least 50% Ronan.

There was no discussion anymore. He goes straight to Ronan’s after school since a conversation they’d had the other day.

“I’m not getting any homework done.”

“Do it here.”

“Ronan,” Adam laughs, “you’re the reason I’m not being productive though.”

“What? How?”

“You seriously don’t know what I’m getting at here? I find you too distracting, obviously.”

“I don’t find anything obvious. Who are your feelings obvious to?”

Adam feels something shift, but smiles instead of taking the bait.

When he was with Ronan, it was impossible to recall that other people existed. Maybe not the other Lynch brothers when they made noise downstairs sometimes when Adam would be over on non-Persephone days. But anyone else? His friends? And the other unknown persons and acquaintance peopling the halls? It was impossible. That was why it was always such a shock to his system to reenter the halls of Aglionby the next day. Not even the moments after being with Ronan, when he would emerge from the house at sunset or past dinner—not too late because Adam was still a responsible creature—could break the spell. His is still carrying the gift of their minutes and hour spent together, breathing the same air, sharing the same skin when he leave the Lynch house, gets into his/Persephone’s car, drives home.

When his brothers arrive, they go for a drive. Ronan wants to teach Adam how to drive stick, but Adam senses something has gone down between him and his older brother. He hates to think it might be that he’s with Ronan. He is _with_ Ronan. Every time he looks at Ronan he still can’t quite believe, it, just like when he looks at the Georgetown letter on his dresser. Because he never lets himself get too comfortable, it surprises him when Ronan’s hair has somehow gotten longer and he has barely tracked it. He can just see the beginnings of curls forming. They’re still short, but he could tell, even at this length that Ronan’s hair would look entirely different than his own grown out to Adam’s same length.

“I like it like this,” whispers Adam.

“Well, good. I haven’t exactly had time to shave it,” says Ronan. “Also...I like it when you pull on it.”

“God, Ronan!”

He knows Ronan has picked up that he likes the things he says, the honest confessions, no matter how embarrassing or crass. Adam gathers them like reserves he will store in a tree before winter comes, like he collects items of clothing, writing utensils, leftovers, propagations from his plants.

When Adam successfully cruises around the country road without stalling, Ronan is so proud. He climbs into Adam’s lap. Running his hands over Ronan’s back and ass, Adam laughs, feeling lighter than ever. “I feel like we’re at Momouth.”

“What?”

“Monmouth. The old manufacturing warehouse?”

“What are you talking about, Parrish?”

“You’ve never—no I guess not.” Adam runs a hand through his hair. “It’s the place everyone goes to make out and…”

“And?”

“You know.”

“You literally had your hand down my pants and you can’t say it?”

“No. It’s not that—”

“You’re still not saying it.”

“It’s just…isn’t it in poor taste to talk about that kind of stuff with…”

“With the guy you’re secretly sleeping with.”

A puff of air escapes Adam. “Yeah.”

“So you’ve gone there before? Fooled around with girls?”

Adam can hear Ronan’s jealousy disguised by disdain. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“No, come on, Parrish. I want to see this place.” He opens the driver door and painfully climbs off of Adam. “Get out.”

“What? Here?”

“You’re going to tell me how to get to the virginity-losing spot.”

“I can drive—”

“No.”

Adam gets out and goes around to the passenger side. Ronan gets in and slams the door. He doesn’t say that the reason he wants to drive is that he wants to set something on fire right now. He doesn’t even know why. Jealousy and anger at himself for being inexperienced and a pointless painful prick of pride that his religion and lack of acknowledgement about his preferences up until recently are what kept him out of this fucking merry go round of STDs and drama.

Ronan drives.

His stony silence prompts Adam to speak. “You can’t get jealous of people who are old news. Situations long over.”

“Will you talk about me like that when this is finished?”

He doesn’t know why he says that. He doesn’t want to remind Adam that impermanence was an option here. But he can’t stop himself. It’s tearing a hole in his stomach, the fear of losing this.

When they get there, he kicks some loose asphalt in the fallow parking lot.

“Fucking impressive.”

“I told you we didn’t have to come here,” Adam says, obviously mad.

He caught Adam’s eye, a few feet away, and did not let him go.

“Do you know I'd give you anything you wanted, Adam.”

Stubbornness shutters down on Adam’s expression. “I'm not asking anything of you.”

“I know that. But I still would. Do you understand?”

Adam is quiet. Analyzing.

“Maybe I should just leave you alone,” Ronan says, because he has always been the best at self-destruction.

“I don’t want that. If you did that...”

“If I did that, what, Parrish?” God, getting Adam Parrish to talk was like pulling teeth. Ronan knew there was a thousand things going on up in that head. “Use your fuckin’ words.”

“Well, honestly I'd be surprised. Seems like you enjoy it.”

Ronan is quiet, then nods, feeling a blackness unspool inside of him. An oil spill.

“I'm sorry. I don’t know how…You're making me feel insecure. Talking about not wanting to be like this anymore ‘cause I thought you liked me, Ronan.”

“I do like you.” He growls it viciously though. A fighting dog who has been tossed in the ring too many times.

Adam had gotten by with mimicry and silence. He’d forged his current friends that way. Adam knows he has to say something. “If you told me you didn't want this I'd be upset.”

“You don’t care that I’m fucked up?”

“They don’t know, Ronan. They don’t know what you’ve gone through.” It’s the first time Adam has mentioned it. All that he has lost. It makes him feel a small bit of hope again.

Then Adam says, finally, _finally,_ “I would miss you.”

The hope flares brighter. And because Ronan is masochistic: “Would you miss sleeping with me?’

“Yes.” Adam finally breathes as Ronan walks up. He stays still as Adam’s pride makes him hesitate. Then one hand is pulling Ronan’s shirt closer and the other hand is resting where his neck meets his shoulder, his thumb gently pressed beside his adam’s apple and Ronan feels hazy. “I’m sorry for fucking up. It’s my first time like this.”

“With a guy?”

“With it meaning something.”

Ronan sighs in relief. “Can we go back to the Barns now?”

“Yes,” Adam says, and all Ronan can see is his brightest, happiest smile before he gets too close for Ronan to see anymore and their mouths are joined in reconciliation and agreement.

When Adam gets home that night, Persephone asks about Ronan.

Adam pauses as he fills his bowl with chili from the stove.

“You think I didn’t know?” she asks, lightly, heels up on her chair, arms around her knees.

“You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?”

She looks truly confused. “Why would I say anything?”

“That might cause problems for me and for Ronan.”

“Why? Does Ronan already have a boyfriend?”

 _Boyfriend._ And then, has she always known Adam was like this? He is discomfited by her lack of reaction.

“Never mind. It’s not my business,” she says, holding up her hands. Adam can’t shake the strangeness of the conversation though.

In bed, he texts Ronan, trying to dispel the feeling he can’t name.

_I miss your mouth._

**Ronan** 9:23 PM: _I miss your hands_

 **Ronan** 9:27 PM: _fuckwit_

Adam laughs aloud, resting his phone over his racing heart.


	7. Ignis aurum probat

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MAN, this chapter went through like 7 drafts, but I think I'm finally happy with it...happy-adjacent anyway. Thank you so much for sticking with me through this. Your comments mean the world, guys. Seriously. <3 So buckle up for an extra long one full of fluff and smut and angst. I hope it's worth the wait.

Ronan throws a ball in the air while Adam does his homework. Tries to do his homework. Adam faces great difficulty concentrating. Ronan sits in his desk chair in sweats and a tank top, bare feet flat on the floor. Adam watches his triceps, one arm behind his head while the other tosses the ball up and catches it repeatedly. Ronan does things like this sometimes, repetitive behaviors that look mindless from the outside, but Adam suspects it is a way Ronan burns off energy while thinking.

Adam sits on Ronan’s bed in boxers and a faded T-shirt after spending the night. The only reason he feels the slightest bit okay doing this is because Matthew and Declan are at the DC townhouse. He likes the way it feels to sit in such a casual state with Ronan while doing something as dull as homework. Even though the rest of the brothers Lynch were out of town, he’d still slept on the bed while Ronan had taken the floor. However, this arrangement had not been reached until after making out until 1, unsuccessfully arguing with Ronan about just sleeping in the bed with him—Ronan pressing his forehead to Adam’s, smiling so wide he felt it in his heart and saying, ‘I’m protecting your virtue,’ making Adam laugh boyishly before Adam eventually just fell asleep on Ronan. Ronan must have slipped out from beneath him in the night.

He thought of that story Ronan had told him, about the dreamer. He thought that if a person could wake up holding whatever he’d dreamt the night before, he would be very lonely. 

Adam splits his mind between his calculus homework and the truth he has been keeping from Ronan: he is going to Georgetown. He doesn’t want to leave Persephone or the stronger, bolder, _normal_ person he has become with his friends behind. But he also doesn’t want to keep being the boy with his past right on his heels. The boy that tucks himself into as small a space as he can bodily fit and loses hours of his life to an anxiety-laced trance he barely remembers.

He wants to tell Ronan he got into Georgetown, but he also doesn’t want to put too much pressure on their…whatever this is between them. He doesn’t expect Ronan to apply there to be with him. He doesn’t expect him to praise him. He just wants to share it because he is proud and happy, and part of that happiness is tied up with Ronan.

Panic tightens his hand around his ball point pen. How could he not have accounted for this?

Chainsaw, with whom Adam had become more acquainted in the last couple weeks, steps off his text book onto the bed. She walks up to where he’s writing in his notebook. She watches his hands for a moment and then tries to pluck the handout sticking out from between his pages.

“No, shithead.”

Adam looks up, appearing disconnected.

“Not you.”

Adam smiles. “I know.”

Ronan slumps, boneless at the sight of the elastic smile.

“Ronan.” Adam’s voice is scratchy, uncertain. He isn’t looking at Ronan anymore, and Ronan feels everything in his body go alert, waiting for the punch.

“I got into the Georgetown.”

A car crash of emotions pummels his ribs and lungs, but after taking a breath, all that’s left is happiness for Adam, who he had watched grind himself to the bone for years to get out of Henrietta. He was finally going to achieve that. With Adam Parrish, anything he wanted was only a matter of time.

Adam returns his attention to his work. Ronan gets up to kneel on the floor.

“Congratulations, Parrish. That’s great."

Adam comes to the edge of the bed. Ronan loves being able to give in to the magnetism between them here at the Barns or at Adam's. He wishes they had more time.

“You're not going to do law or something when you’re just as much of a story nerd as I am, right?”

That smile again. “English.”

“When do I get to read your story that got a gold star from Neary?” Ronan asks, hands swinging Adam's knees side to side.

Adam’s mouth looks gorgeous when tries to bite down his smirk. “You wanna read that?”

“Come _on_ , Einstein,” Ronan says, pulling Adam’s legs out so that he falls back. He hits his head on his Calculus book.

“Ow,” says Adam.

Undeterred Ronan lays his full weight on top of Adam. “I thought you were smarter than that.”

“Get up, Lynch. You’re fuckin’ _heavy._ ”

Ronan shakes his head. Adam touches his face, making Ronan close his eyes. He runs his hands, then his nails, over his scalp.

Ronan drops his head and lets a harsh breath out of his nose. He has never felt closer to another person. He doesn’t know what to do about everything he feels for this boy. He doesn’t feel like he could ever do enough. He kisses Adam's neck, which leads to a moan slipping out of an unvigilant Adam, which leads to Ronan being ruthlessly turned on.

Frantically, they find skin with hands down pants. They bring each other off with Adam sucking Ronan's neck and Ronan pulling back to watch Adam as he comes. After, Ronan stretches out beside him, tracing Adam's side under his T-shirt.

“Declan would love it if I went to Georgetown.”

“Why’s that?” Adam asks, sleepily.

Ronan couldn’t remember the last time Adam had been this relaxed. It was part of why he’d asked him to spend the night. He’d noticed how full of tension he was at school, like a crank and gears being wound tighter and tighter. He sees evidence of it in Adam’s inset exhausted eyes, his cracked hands. He knows he works at the mechanic shop, Boyd’s, only part-time, but he also knows Adam doesn’t take very good care of himself.

Watching Adam at school, glazed, far-away stare passing over his friends and his textbooks, professors and notes, was part of what made last night and right now so prized. Being able to touch Adam when he clearly needed strong fingers to knead his shoulders, or to be a still, quiet place for Adam to close his eyes, or to just lay his weight on top of him when he looked like he was starting to step out of himself and needed to be reminded ‘you are right here’ and ‘I am with you’ was so much more than Ronan thought he’d ever be to him.

“Besides, I thought he didn’t like me.”

Ronan chooses not to respond to that—see? Not a lie. “Because he has a townhouse in DC, and he’d love to keep a closer eye on me while he’s shitfooting up the political ladder.”

Adam huffs a laugh. “He’s into politics.” It is more of an acknowledgement of what was obvious than a question

“What else?” Ronan scoffs, tracing a thumb over the fine dusting of blonde hair on Adam’s arm.

“Antiques?” Adam shrugs, yawns. “Would we pretend not to know each other if you went to Georgetown too?”

Ronan doesn’t answer immediately, and Adam’s drowsiness falls away. Ronan gets up and leaves the room. Adam doesn’t know why he said that. He feels sick with his misstep.

When Ronan returns, Adam catches his arm as he’s walking by and brings Ronan down, kneeling beside the bed again with an entirely different mood coloring the air.

“I’m sorry,” says Adam.

“I would never pretend not to know you.”

Adam nods, swallows. When he leaves, he feels sick and miserable, though Ronan kisses him goodbye at the door like nothing has happened. Resolute, Adam nods and, with his backpack over his shoulder full of clothes he will most certainly be washing himself, trudges down the stairs to go back home.

***

Ignoring Adam at school, the prolonged _lie_ of this act, is taking its toll on him. Ronan hates that they are still doing this, but he’d told Adam this was okay, that he could do whatever he wanted to figure this out. What hurts is Ronan knows exactly how much this is worth it to him and that Adam isn’t there yet. Might not ever get there. Not before he left Ronan for Georgetown anyway.

When they are finally, _finally_ alone together at Adam’s, Ronan feels the tie in his pocket, burning against his thigh. He drops one hand from Adam’s ribs to pull it out. The promise in the tie’s slither, the guarantee of what was to come, make his breath hitch, catching Adam’s curiosity. He glances down to where Ronan drags the tie up between them.

Watching Adam with the same focused attention he has always paid Adam Parrish, Ronan wraps Adam’s tie around one of his wrists, slowly winding it through the iron wrought frame. Adam carefully watches, but doesn’t move. Ronan knows he has to complete the act. He knows Adam needs all the data points. He offers the other end and his free wrist to Adam. He was new skin everywhere, itching and tight. What if…what if this freaked him out? But he’d had dreams about this. Of being restrained by Adam Parrish, his hands… _his hands_ able to touch Ronan anywhere he wanted, do anything he wanted.

Adam’s face betrays nothing as he takes the tie and finishes securing Ronan’s hands. He sits back to observe the completed tableau. Though Ronan’s trying to keep the muscles in his face hard, ready to play off diffidence if his offering is turned away, he knows he looks rattled and feverish. How does a body contain a dying star without showing some evidence of the fragmentation?

“Is this what you want?” Adam’s voice is low, choked. 

“I want you.”

Adam groans, pressing Ronan into the bed with his weight as he leans down. To kiss him—no, to slowly thrust against him before grating somewhere near Ronan's jaw, “How do you _do_ that?”

“What?” Ronan croaks, rolling his hips into Adam uncontrollably. His offer has been met. He is elated. He is fire, a nebula rebuilding a new star, millions of new stars.

“It’s like you’re taking exactly what I want out of my head before I even know it. You…” Adam breathes, hand tentatively sliding up Ronan’s bare chest—he'd never had this without Ronan's hands distracting him. He brushes his thumb over a nipple and Ronan arches, groaning.

“Oh, Ronan. Damn. _Damn_.”

He sits back again, looking completely lost to pleasure already, eyes dark with power, mouth wet. Ronan is lost to bliss at making Adam look like that, just laying here and giving Adam himself. _He wants me. He wants me back._ Adam’s callused fingers scratch down Ronan’s chest, disappearing between Adam's legs, to tease beneath the hem of Ronan’s boxers.

He closes his eyes, because it’s too much. He can hear himself almost whining, being given something he’d never really understood that he needed. He can’t believe this is happening. This is another one of his dreams pulled into reality. He really is the Graywaren. This was proof. Here was Adam Parrish on top of him, taking control of him, the only person in the world he was happy to give it up to.

“Is it too tight?” Adam asks breathless.

Ronan realizes his hand has traveled back up his arm to the tie. He feels the feather light touch in retrospect.

“No.”

Adam stares down at him, overwhelmed with where he wants to start, with possibility. “Tell me if you want out.”

“I won’t want out.”

“Lynch,” Adam says sternly, because he is very practiced at depriving himself pleasure in favor of being sensible. “Just tell me if you want out, you’ll say so.”

“Fine. Can we get on with this very pressing matter now?” He rolls up into Adam, emphasizing his point.

Adam sits back, slowly stands up. “I believe I’m the one deciding that now.”

Ronan’s breath quickens. Adam had not known him at all, or did not have the capability to see the whole picture from the parts he was afforded a glimpse. He is excited to crack him open and learn what, exactly, makes Ronan tick.

He stands by the edge of the bed. He pushes down on himself through his jeans. Then pulls off his shirt.

“Scoot up. As much as you can,” he says. His eyes track the muscles in Ronan’s arms as he lifts his bound hands to grab the bed frame and pull himself up.

“Good,” Adam says, the instinct to praise when Ronan does what he says the most natural thing in the world.

Adam straddles him, still in his jeans, and bites Ronan’s tricep.

“Fuck, Adam!” Ronan sounds surprised and a little wrecked, the high note to his voice betraying him.

Adam leans forward, mouth right near Ronan's. He struggles to get closer. Adam shakes his head and he goes still, getting that hazy look Adam has seen before when he’d restrained Ronan. Adam rewards him, putting his fingers on Ronan’s bottom lip. He greedily opens for Adam. When Adam slips them in further, Ronan sucks on them, tongue going between. It feels holy. It looks filthy. Adam is so hard it hurts.

Adam pulls his hand back. “Do you like that?”

“Jesus _fuuuuuucking_ Christ,” Ronan pants.

“Yes or no.”

“ _Yes_ ,” he says like a prayer.

Adam is a marvel of bodily response, brain nerves lighting up with an image of what his next move should be as he touches Ronan. He could not believe how easy this could be. With other people, everything had seemed so pre-dictated, every touch and kiss so corralled by borders. Here, in his bed with Ronan Lynch, endless possibilities stretched out before them that Adam had never even imagined.

“That was what you wanted?” He didn’t want to leave anything ambiguous. He wants to mark the page Ronan is on and come back to it again later, reread it again and again.

“Yes!” Ronan shouts, nearly arching off the bed.

Adam feels like he’s flying. Every time he touches Ronan he feels like he can feel Ronan’s arousal, hear his thoughts--never mind that’s all cursing. He has never felt this close to another person. He has never felt so _known_.

“I’m going to take off your pants.”

Ronan stares at him, already blissed out, eyes almost black with pupil, completely at Adam's disposal.

“Okay?”

“Please,” Ronan croaks, but it’s a little sarcastic. Not an entreaty. Not yet.

Adam removes his pants and his boxers, gulping breaths as he goes. He stands back, brutally turned on. He's so fucking hungry for Ronan, he doesn’t know where to begin. He takes off his own pants, aware of Ronan’s attention, his eyes swallowing Adam in.

“Turn over.” He watches Ronan’s arms again as he uses his bonds to rearrange his thick body. Adam’s eyes travel down, over the lurid ink on his back, and get stuck on his ass.

He climbs back over him, straddles his thick thighs. He thinks of smacking Ronan's ass to watch it jiggle. He imagines spitting into the hot crevice between his ass cheeks and using his dick to drive Ronan crazy, spreading his cheeks and moving a finger against him…Adam is lightheaded. He turns his attention up to his tattoo, touches Ronan's back as he grips himself at the base. Then he leans down and bites him again.

“Nnnghhhh!” It’s almost an animal sound that tears out of Ronan. He knows Ronan likes it because he’s rocking against the bed.

He lets his dick fall right on top of Ronan's ass and leans forward to his ear. “Do not come yet, Ronan.”

Ronan falls still.

“Good. You’re so good. You’re perfect.” He might have been embarrassed about talking like this if he’d had a thought to spare for anything other than the naked boy strung up in front of him and the filthy things running through his head. It pleases him to praise Ronan. He _has_ to do it.

He bites down Ronan's back, watching the intricate muscles tense beneath his tattoo. He was a good student, so he paid close attention to what Ronan responded to, which was everything. Every single thing he does sets Ronan struggling against his binding. It is the sexiest thing he's ever seen, and he's watched a lot of porn—he's always been so good at research. He dips lower and bites Ronan's ass cheek a little harder because, again, he _has to._

“ _Adam_ ,” Ronan begs.

Ronan Lynch _begging_ him.

“Do you like not seeing what I’m doing to you?” He doesn’t bother restraining his accent, because Ronan likes it.

Ronan groans, but it’s an agreeable sound.

“Ronan,” he says sternly.

“Yes,” Ronan answers, his voice rough with a certain note that makes Adam tell him to turn over. Having free reign to look at Ronan, touch him, bite him without Ronan being able to see him is exciting, but he wants to see his face, look into his eyes. At the sight of Ronan’s face, flushed, breathless, eyes dark with need, Adam feels a flood of weakness run through his frame for this boy who asked to take off their clothes after they first kissed, because he wanted Adam, even then.

“Sit up like before.” Adam’s own voice was scratchy as though unused.

He straddles Ronan so that their dicks are close enough to touch, but doesn’t let Ronan get closer yet. He presses a hand to his chest, letting his callused thumb scratch against Ronan’s nipple.

“Do you know that I’m going to fuck you one day?” He is surprised it comes out of his mouth but Ronan's burning stare and panting make him go on. “Just like this, with you tied up.” He runs a hand along Ronan’s side. “Do you want that?”

“Yes,” Ronan says. Adam can tell he is trying to keep his voice steady.

“I thought you wanted me to take you apart, Ronan?”

“I do,” Ronan huffs, frowning.

Adam takes both of their dicks and holds them together, rutting so close that his hand is almost stuck between their sweaty stomachs. “Then let me,” he says. 

Ronan gives a strangled cry at the fullness of the touch. Adam slows down to let him breathe. He doesn’t want him too close yet, even though he is barely keeping it together out of pure determination to see Ronan lose all of his control, to make him want to surrender it all to Adam.

His thoughts catch up to him in this place of pure pleasure. He’d had sex a couple of times with girls he didn’t particularly care about and never like _this_. It had been good, objectively—a release. An escape from who he was if only for a short while. He hadn’t felt anything though. And worse was the reenaction of his every sexual encounter by his friends, because the girls he’d slept with had gone on to talk to everyone about it. He’d never understood that aspect of school’s social economy. He’d always been so good at impersonating but he’d never taken part in this exchange of information about another person he’d shared intimacy with—gossip. He even hated the word. He understood it was a kind of currency traded in high school, but he couldn’t stand those very private moments being so public. But he had not felt then what he feels now, which was a crescendo of emotion rising inside of him. He knows this, what he and Ronan are doing, is creating an opening directly to his soul. He can feel it tearing open something at the core of him, and he is fucking horrified by the thought of anything outside of this room ever touching this, them, either of them the way they are in this moment. He is shaking at even the idea of that possibility. But he also knows, unlike those other times, that Ronan would continue to keep his secrets. And maybe that’s exactly why they have this.

“I need to hear you, Adam. _Please_.”

An animal sound tears out of Adam at the request, the desperate inflection on that plead, release and despair because he could feel he was no longer his own.

He doesn’t know what to do with the way Ronan is looking at him. Like there had ever only been Adam for him, the wonder in his face as Adam touches him. Adam can’t stop looking up at the tie around Ronan’s wrists. He treads a fine line between extreme arousal and the incipient pain of giving half of himself away to Ronan.

He adjusts them so his thighs are beneath Ronan’s hips. Ronan practically in his lap. He grips Ronan’s ass and jerks him closer and closer, fingers digging in to the muscle of his cheeks, as he thrusts his cock against Ronan’s without the guidance of his hands. The result is a misaligned mess of precum and inexperienced exuberance that Adam completely gives himself over to in a way he has never allowed himself anything.

He takes Ronan’s neck between his lips, sucking and biting without restraint.

“Fuck, Adam!”

Just as he feels Ronan's cum paint his stomach with heat, Adam follows in a starburst of light and waves upon breakers of impossible, uncomplicated pleasure. He twines his hands with Ronan's, to press their foreheads together. He wants to be closer.

 _“Adam._ ” Ronan practically whispers it with so much breath. 

_I love you_ , Adam thinks. Deliriously, he wonders if he has subconsciously translated Ronan’s breathy prayer, then logic trickles back in, startling him.

He doesn’t know where they’ve come from, but those words together are the clearest, purest thought he’s ever had. He’d only ever said it aloud once, to his mother. Because Adam had evolved into a watchful creature, gifted at tracking the emotions and thoughts of others by the slightest shift in their facial features, he knew she wasn’t sure she returned the sentiment. She had calculated and found him wanting. After some moments of silence that felt larger than the room, the trailer, the entire sky, she said she loved him too. But he knew this was only a mercy due to his age. Only a monster would tell a child that it cannot be loved.

“I’m sorry,” he says as though he did say the words out loud, words that because he didn’t even understand them would be a lie.

“Why the fuck?” Ronan says, voice coarse, tongue thick with sleepiness.

Adam can’t say it though. He’s mortified.

Ronan clenches his hand.

Adam realizes he’s still tied up, and his wrists must be hurting with the additional strain of Adam’s body dropped on top of him. “Jesus, Ronan.”

He hurriedly loosens the tie and lays back, gathering Ronan close to him, their sweating, sticky bodies touching everywhere. He’s not ready for distance, physical or otherwise, to come between them despite logic arguing that they’ve made a complete mess of his bed and themselves.

“Are you okay?” whispers Adam. It doesn’t feel right to speak loud right now.

“Fucking fantastic.”

“I bet that’s not what you imagined when you asked if we could take our clothes off,” Adam muses to keep his mind off of _I love you._ He’s shivering everywhere. Ronan puts a hand on Adam’s chest, and Adam thinks it’s to calm his shaking, but then he turns his whole body and buries his face into Adam’s neck, arm around his neck, pulling them impossibly closer. Adam marvels at Ronan’s strength, that he’d allowed Adam to strip it all from him.

“Hey, hey, hey. That was so fucking perfect, Ronan. Do you know that? Could you tell how much I—” he trips over the word. “I loved it?”

Ronan burrows deeper, hot breaths coming fast against Adam’s neck. Adam strokes his back, confused and worried.

“You liked it, right?” He doesn’t know what he’ll do if Ronan says no. All the connotations of that thought—dominate, control, pressure, disgust, kink, incompatible, monster—are so terrifying, so painful, he squeezes his eyes shut and hurriedly thinks about something else.

Finally, Ronan’s voice vibrating against the skin of his throat: “It was my idea.”

Adam was not expecting that. He is right, of course. Ronan had produced the tie from nowhere like a magician.

They’re quiet for a long time. Eventually Ronan pulls out of his arms to lay on his back beside him, unashamed by his nudity.

Adam gets up to clean himself and get a t-shirt. He cleans Ronan mostly off with it while Ronan watches him with a gaze that looks half asleep.

“You can take a shower if you want.”

“Come here.” Ronan’s voice is shot.

Adam suddenly wants to cry. Though he knows it was Ronan who initiated this, Adam has played his part as well. He knows that from the beginning, he’s found pleasure in holding Ronan back, in controlling how their physical moments played out. Ronan’s initiation and Adam’s answering volley has left them on the other side of some sort of Rubicon here. He understands it’s natural for them each to feel vulnerable. But that doesn’t stop this need he has growing inside of him for _something._ He isn’t sure there are words for whatever it is that he needs, that he needs so badly.

He lays beside him _._ Ronan picks up his hand to touch it, examine it, like he’d started freely doing after Adam had spent the night and they’d stayed up, entangled and giddy.

“They don't smell like oil,” says Ronan.

Adam is in awe that anyone would notice such a small thing about him.

“Only after the shop.”

“I like it. But I like this more.” Ronan touches his forehead and nose to the back of Adam’s hand, runs his nose up over the index knuckle and finger. Adam’s body breaks out with goosebumps.

“They smell like me.”

Stripped of context, it sounds dirty, but right now, it is the sweetest thing Adam has ever heard.

Ronan gets up and leaves, walking out of Adam's room naked, because Persephone had left them doing homework at the table, saying she would be out until late. Adam lays, unmoving, listening to him open a cabinet in the bathroom. He returns with lotion and pulls Adam against him again, his chest to Adam’s back, a muscled, heavy arm through over his shoulder and slung carelessly across his chest. Adam’s throat is so painfully tight, he can’t trust himself to say anything. Ronan takes his hand and rubs lotion into his dry cracking knuckles, massaging it in with care.

A brush fire of emotion runs its course through Adam’s body. It painfully reminds him of the time that had made him deaf in one ear, roaming the fields aimless, homeless, lifeless. Because what were you without a person to go back to? What was a home but a person you felt safe with, and Adam had had no one. 

“ _Miseria fortes viros.”_

Adam returns to himself, rapidly translating the Latin carried by Ronan’s rough voice, draws up the beginning of the quote _, ignis aurum probot._ Fire tests gold; adversity tests strong men.

“Ronan,” Adam says on a sob that he cannot control. He hates that he can't control it. It scares the shit out of him.

“I know what you’re thinking, but it’s alright,” Ronan says, and Adam feels the words seep from Ronan's chest into his back.

He shakes his head, unable to believe that the miracle of Ronan Lynch has _seen_ him and determined he is worthy. He lays his head back against Ronan’s shoulder, watching Ronan’s hands as he massages his chapped and burning knuckles.

The first day on the other side of their Rubicon is awkward. When Adam sees Ronan at his locker, everything in his body wants to go to him, kiss him against it, whisper a dirty Latin joke into his ear to hear his raspy laugh. He has to consciously tell his feet to stop moving when he reaches his own locker. Ronan looks over at him, insolently, daring him to come further. Adam faces his locker. The war of desires inside of him made him break out in a silver sweat.

The second day is worse. It is clear to Adam how miserable they are, and, remarkably, despite his horde of friends, how lonely they both are. Despite his best efforts, Ronan doesn’t have a good poker face. At least not with Adam anymore. Adam talks himself out of smoothing the crease between Ronan’s eyebrows by reassuring himself of the intensity of their connection outside of school. Being distant here could not affect how good they were together.

At lunch, he quickly scans the cafeteria, feeling illicit. He finds Ronan right away. After making sure he is eating and looking well, he settles down at his table. After a moment, he realizes how stupid this game is, how inadequate for him to convince himself Ronan is okay when he is not next to Adam _because_ _of_ Adam.

“Lynch hasn’t taken his eyes off of you,” Tad says, and Adam hates how deceptively casual the observation sounds.

Adam says nothing, glances at Ronan, who has already turned his stare away. For a moment, Adam loses himself in the humid space between their mouths and bodies from just two days ago. He returns to his food, offering no response. 

Ronan had told him he thought Adam had hated him because of the way they’d first met, when Niall had picked Adam up from the fields like a stray. He knew Adam enough to know that anyone seeing him so broken would humiliate him. Ronan understanding this about him is one of the realest things he’s ever experienced. But the way he walks right by him, looking through him, like nothing has happened between them twists something inside of him.

Like nothing has happened.

They are always going about their way like nothing has happened. Though Adam knows this is Ronan’s armor, his indifferent exterior the only protection he has against the frankly miserable situation Adam has devised for them, _something_ has happened.

In physics, when he and Ronan are paired up for an assignment, Ronan storms out. As everyone exchanges desks to be closer to their partners, Adam follows him out. The professor only raises an eyebrow, likely assuming the top student in the class is going to try to talk the trouble-maker down.

Adam opens the bathroom in the corridor to find it empty. He comes out and looks down the deserted hallway. He walks to the doors outside to find Ronan leaning against the wall by the door.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, voice calm and logical.

“You know exactly what’s wrong.”

Ronan is a harbinger of truth; asking him to sit next to Adam in class and not speak to him like they’d been speaking to one another for weeks is asking the sky to turn green. Adam doesn’t know what to say to make it better. He doesn’t know how to come out with their relationship. For everyone to know that he has been seeing Ronan outside of school and completely ignoring him in school is an unpardonable thought. Not even that Adam will be coming out as liking guys, but that he has been courting a secret affair with Ronan, friendless fighter of men and school outcast.

“I’m not like you. I can’t pretend like I don’t know what you taste like, Adam.”

Adam feels the truth of it run its course down his body. “Ronan,” he pleads on a breath.

“I know. You’ve got your reputation to protect.” He’s not looking at Adam, but rather out at the immaculate lawn and to the parking lot beyond. He looks exactly like he wants to get behind the wheel of the BMW and get as far away from here as possible.

Adam runs a hand through his hair. “It’s not even that.”

“I’m all ears, Adam.” Ronan turns to him and Adam cannot bring himself to say a single word in the face of Ronan’s very obvious pain. “You think because I let you tie me up and shit that I don’t—that I’m not affected by this, that I don’t—”

He spins away from Adam and slams the flat of his hand against Borden House. “Fuck! I’m sorry, I know I agreed to it. But I can’t be here with you, not like this.”

Feeling numb, Adam watches him walk off. He is helpless to stop him. There is only one thing Adam can do to fix this and he _can’t._ His fear is two-fold. Once he got past the absolute, immovable impossibility of going public, Adam knows the next step is to fully give into this. And if he does that, he’ll expose himself as the monster he truly is under everything, and that he can’t actually do this. He’d so nearly told him he loved him. Once those words were said, Adam couldn’t take them back. But it hurts. Ronan’s pain hurts him. He doesn’t know how he would even change the situation. How it could work. His desperation to keep their privacy safe was foremost, it aligned with his most basic instinctual needs. 

In typical fashion, Adam has forgotten the rest of the world exists while confronted with all the impossibility of Ronan Lynch. When he returns to physics, he is so far away in his head that it takes him too long to realize his friends are giving him shit. 

“Why are you acting so weird, Parrish?” Tad asks when he returns to his seat, partnerless.

“Yeah, you guys make a perfectly respectable couple,” Eric says, offhandedly in a way that Adam _knows_ he is messing around, but that silver sweat slicks down his back again, paints his hairline. He wants to use his body as a shield to protect how vulnerable he was in Ronan’s arms. He hunches over his desk, trying to control his body’s anxious reactions to the outside world touching him and Ronan.

“I can be your partner, Adam.”

He looks up. Rachel Moran is looking at him. He blinks, trying to calm his heart, before nodding.

He scoots his desk toward hers. “Is everything okay with…your friends?”

“Oh yeah. They just like giving me a hard time.”

“It’s kind of cruel. To pick on Ronan Lynch for being gay.”

Adam has to check his reaction. “What?”

She looks uncomfortable. “I mean…I guess I thought that’s what it was about.”

Adam glances back at Tad and Eric. Tad is looking at him.

“Anyway, this kind of works out, because I wanted to ask you if you had a date for prom.”

It takes Adam a moment to catch up.

“Oh, no. I mean, I wasn’t planning on going.”

“Oh.”

“If you can’t find anyone else to take you, I’ll go with you.” He doesn’t know exactly why he says it. Maybe it was because of how disappointed she sounded. But he didn’t have to worry because Rachel Moran definitely had her pick of dates.

She leans closer. “Yes. Let’s go together.”

“What?”

“I want to go with you, Adam.”

He knows they are close enough for his friends to overhear. He suddenly worries at how turning down the hottest girl in school would look, how it would give them more fodder, how it would expose him and Ronan.

“Okay,” he says, suddenly decisive. It’s as easy as putting on a mask.

As the day drudges on, monochromatic without Ronan clunking down the halls, he has forgotten all about the conversation with Rachel. There is only Ronan on his mind, Ronan and that literature exam tomorrow.

After the distraction of school is gone, he can only think about how this entire scenario was orchestrated by him. He doesn’t want it, but he needs to keep it this way. He is an animal caught with his leg in a trap.

He wants to give Ronan something other than empty platitudes, to show his hand. He does the only thing that feels right.

***

“The fuck?” Ronan asks when he opens the door to a girl furiously chewing gum on his doorstep. She’s holding a handful of pathetic looking white flowers surrounding a single red rose.

“Ronan Lynch?”

“Yeah?” he barks, almost angry. There is something clearly amiss here. He realizes too late that he did not heed his brother’s warning about opening the door to strangers. He feels a thrill of pleasure at his thoughtless disobedience.

“These are for you. Sign here, please.”

“Wait. Back this truck up.”

Her expression remains placid.

“Do I look like someone who gets _flowers_?”

“I don’t know, man. Can you just sign my shit, so I can go?”

He signs her clipboard and takes the flowers, holding them out from his person. As he carries them in the kitchen to—what was he supposed to do with them? Leave them on the counter? Toss them in the sink?—he notices a small card camouflaged amid the white flowers. He gingerly lays them on the counter to pull out the card.

 _I’m sorry._ Tanquam alter idem.

Ronan drops the card, leans over the counter, hands pressing into the cool surface to steady himself as he stares at the words.

 _As if a second self._ That was exactly why not being able to talk to Adam at school hurt so much. But here was Adam, acknowledging that he felt the same.

“What’s that?” Declan asks walking behind him to the fridge.

“Flowers,” says Ronan, swiping the card to put into his pocket.

“For who?”

“Me, Asshole.”

Declan backs against the counter Ronan was leaning over. He examines Ronan’s face.

“Adam?”

Ronan nods. Declan drops his exhaustive examination of Ronan’s face down to the flowers.

“I told you not to answer the door for anyone you don’t know.”

Ronan wants to beat him with the bouquet, but he also can’t touch it because it feels like he’s accepting the lie—does it mean ‘sorry, things are going to stay like this’ or ‘sorry for being a dick, let’s make out against my locker tomorrow’? So he keeps looking at it instead, feeling the words _tanquam alter idem_ against his thigh.

Eventually Persephone sweeps by with one of his mother’s vases and carefully sets the modest arrangement inside, meeting Ronan’s gaze. He thinks if Persephone was a normal person, she might have smiled at him. But she wasn’t, so she didn’t, which is just as well to Ronan who cannot stop playing the words in his head.

He stays home from school the next day, and Declan believes he isn’t feeling well because why would he play hooky after receiving flowers from his boyfriend? Ronan smirks to himself as he lays in bed, the entire house still, while Chainsaw skips across his bunched comforter.

Adam had texted him when he hadn’t been at school this morning, telling Ronan he was coming over since he hadn’t seen him since yesterday. He didn’t ask if Ronan was okay—he knew Ronan wasn’t sick.

He watches from the window seat in the library as Adam pulls up. When Persephone lets Adam through, he pulls his headphones down. He hears Adam trot up the stairs.

He’s about to walk past the library to Ronan’s room and doubles back. “Hey,” he says, hands in his pockets.

“Hey.”

“Did you get my flowers?”

“I did,” Ronan says, looking down to hide his smile.

Adam smiles too, ready to come closer, but stops himself.

“I wanted to tell you, before you heard it from anyone else—”

Ronan interrupts him with a kiss and one of those smiles only Adam and his brothers have ever seen.

“What?” he asks against Adam’s mouth.

“I asked Rachel Moran to prom.”

Adam says it like dropping something heavy onto the floor. Ronan doesn’t breathe as dust motes form crop circles in the air.

He steps back. It feels like his chest is caving in. “That why you sent flowers? Some sort of breakup gesture?” He can’t believe how wrong he got this.

“What? No, Ronan. _God._ That was just because I was sorry, for…”

“For keeping me your dirty little secret.”

“It’s not like that. I’m not…”

“What?”

“Ashamed of you.”

“But you’re taking Rachel to prom.” Ronan is surprised he’s still speaking. His mouth and tongue are completely numb.

“It’s not romantic or anything.”

Ronan hates the way Adam sounds, like he’s trying to get Ronan to see the logic of it if he weren’t so stubborn.

“Just as friends.”

“Like we’re just friends.”

The way Ronan says it, so quietly, completely devoid of anything, scares Adam. Not because he’s afraid for himself. _Parrish has nothing to fear from me._ He’d wanted Adam to tie him up for fuck’s sake! It sounds, impossibly, like he’d badly wounded Ronan. He realizes why this feels so strange suddenly. It was a familiar path he’d reviewed over and over again that had led them to the abandoned warehouse. He had made Ronan feel bad, somehow not worthy of Adam. He has a sudden petrifying realization that there might be no coming back from this. His dread makes his mouth clumsy. He lost all pathos, all power to convince Ronan that he was wrong.

“No. That’s different.”

“Are you fucking her?”

“I’m not that greedy. When would I even have the time?” The returning silence is deafening. “That was a joke.”

“Yeah, I don’t get it or care.”

“What’s the issue here then?”

Ronan was quiet for so long, turning the bands round and around his wrist. Adam could still see the hickey he’d given Ronan right at the line of his collar. He badly wanted to kneel down before Ronan, like Ronan had days ago, and press his lips there, right on that spot. Reset.

Ronan shifted his weight, his posture suddenly incendiary, bracing. “I want you to hit me.”

“What?”

“Hit me, Adam.” He isn’t goading Adam. It’s a plain request that Adam doesn’t understand.

“No,” Adam says, shaking his head, stepping back. “Why are you asking me to do that?”

Ronan nods his head. _So that’s acceptable, but this isn’t?_ That Adam would choose to go to prom with some girl rather than acknowledge what they were. Because what they’d done was too big to keep a secret. It consumes all of him, who Ronan is, hopes to be, had once been. The fact that Adam wants to keep it covered, buried neatly away makes him sick. He has grossly miscalculated the situation; he thought he understood Adam’s thought process. He was a fucking idiot.

“You should go.”

Adam shakes his head, like he’s trying to clear it, like he didn’t hear Ronan. “Wait. Why did you want me to hit you. Talk to me!”

“Go. Leave. _Relinquo_.”

“Don’t do this, Ronan.”

Ronan doesn’t say a word. Adam is reminded of months ago when Ronan had begrudgingly given him is phone number and hadn’t responded for so long Adam thought he’d read the signs wrong. He remembers feeling helpless, thinking maybe he wasn’t on Ronan’s mind the way Ronan was constantly on his.

When Ronan still says nothing, he leaves to wait for Persephone in the car. Even his desire to appear fine doesn’t keep him from shaking when she slides into the passenger seat.

Starting the engine, putting it into gear, looking over his shoulder and backing up actually has a calming effect on him. Handling the necessary tasks of getting them home and the cold, thoughtless movements associated with the act.

When they’re nearly halfway home, Adam feels the need to confess. Or to clean up his mess, divert attention away from everything that has happened with Ronan.

“I asked Rachel Moran to the prom.”

“What about Ronan?” Persephone asks, slow and deliberate.

“I don’t know.”

 _"_ Pull over, please,” she says in a light child's voice.

“What? Here?” Adam asks, distracted and tired.

She points to a parking lot up ahead. When he puts the car into park, she looks at him with her liquid eyes in her pale face, glow of the dash on her tinting her skin orange. Her voice is calm. “You see him every day after school, and you won’t acknowledge him in school. I'm disappointed, Adam.”

Adam has no answer for himself. He hates how easily she has read the situation.

“What are you thinking?”

“I don’t know.”

“How could you do something like this?”

“Can we just not talk about it?”

“I think I'll walk,” she says finally, opening the door.

“Persephone. Come _on_.”

“I'll see you at home.” She begins walking off as though she’d planned all along to walk into the bodega at the corner. Shamed by Persephone’s reaction, Adam feels his throat closing up with tears. He punches the bottom of the steering wheel once, and forces himself to stop. He covers his eyes, pressing the burning sensation away. Then he drives home.

He hadn’t realized when Ronan left class the other day that it could have been taken to mean he wouldn’t be returning at all. Or maybe Adam had done that yesterday. During class and in the library, trying to finish an econ paper, he kept trying to think of the right combination of words to get Ronan to answer him. On day three, he resorts to begging.

Adam 10:11 AM: _Please just let me know you’re okay._

It stays unread.

***

Declan doesn’t believe he’s sick anymore. The cruel twist is that, now, he actually is He is physically ill, as ill as he had ever been with the flu or fever. He doesn't have the energy to get out of bed and instead stays amid its clouded tufts, staring at the fauxwood ceiling fan silently spinning.

Over the past three days he has been subjected to a string of texts from Adam, growing increasingly more distraught. It kills him to leave Adam in silence, but he can’t. He _can’t_.

“Get up,” Declan tells him, slicked and coiffed for the day. “Your ass is going to school.”

Ronan doesn’t say a word, but continues staring at the ceiling fan. Declan tries to hold out, but Ronan had always been better at the silent game. He hears Declan mutter ‘goddamn it’ as his steps fade down the hallway.

Some hours after Matthew and Declan leave, Declan texts him ‘he would stop feeding Ronan’s fucking cows and they would starve if he didn’t get his ass up to take care of them’. So Ronan gets his ass up to take care of them. After he finishes, he leans on one of the wooden fence railings, exhausted. He stares at nothing, doing fucking nothing.

His phone starts ringing and he pulls it out, ready to bark at his brother or, even better, completely ignore him. But it’s Adam. He just got out of school. Ronan watches the phone ring with the default sound, ‘Parrish’ lit up on his screen.

He falls to his knees.

_I'm falling in love with someone I can’t have, Dad. What do I do?_

The funeral prayer comes to his mind, bringing with it memories of his dad's funeral, he and his brothers wandering like ghosts in their home which became a strange place with others who were not the Lynch family traipsing through it.

_May those who love us, love us; and those who don’t love us, may God turn their hearts…_

He doesn’t know how long he sits there with his head down before Pluer butts her head against his elbow. His pants have long since been soaked by the grass. He throws down his phone and walks off.

That night, he doesn’t come out for dinner, so Matthew comes up. He must look awful when Matthew appears in the doorway, because Matthew’s chin dimples like he’s about to cry with Ronan.

“Hey. Hey,” he says coming in and sitting on the edge of Ronan's bed.

“I wasn’t enough.”

“You shouldn’t have to change yourself, Pal. Screw other people.”

“Don’t fucking swear,” Ronan says, because it feels good to do something so familiar and well-worn as telling his little brother who swears like a greeting card not to fucking swear.

“In the end, it’s how you will let what anyone else thinks effect how you think of yourself, okay?”

Ronan cannot speak, hates that his younger brother feels the need to say these words to him, hates how right he is.

“Do you want me to get a couple of D’s pills?”

“No” Ronan rasps. What he really wants is a beer. Something. But instead, he just lays there and cannot move.

***

Almost a month later, Adam has to physically pull himself out of bed on prom night, put on a less crumpled undershirt, and do something to his hair, which had been flattened on one side by his pillow by lying in bed for hours, staring at the far wall in his bedroom. There was nothing he could do about his gaunt face and exhausted eyes. He’d dreamt about Ronan almost nightly, waking up full—bodily and mentally—of painful longing.

“I have no desire to do this,” he tells Persephone as she fixes his tie. He is still ashamed to look her in the eye.

“Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to.”

So he marches to the gallows pole. He wonders what the hell he was thinking as he stands in Rachel’s living room, waiting for her to come down. He wonders what the hell is wrong with him as they dance he can see that she knows he’s not into it. ‘Prom is a farce’ Ronan would say. No, he’d say something better than that, more biting. But Adam was losing his touch with his Ronanisms. It had been too long. He’d asked Persephone a few nights ago as they had their coffee and tea, whether she’d seen Ronan.

Adam had gotten radio silence and he had to know.

“I see him sometimes.”

“Is he alright?”

“You hurt him.”

“This is a bit of an overreaction though, isn’t it? It’s just a stupid dance.”

“Then why go at all?” Persephone had asked him. He’d had no answer for her. “I don’t think it's a bad thing that you feel bad right now, Adam.”

Adam begs to differ.

At some point, after the pointless ritual of the dance, Adam goes outside for some air, stands at the top steps of Aglionby’s multi-million dollar gymnasium and stares out into the night. He looks down at his hands, hanging limply from his wrists. Eventually, he turns to go in but finds Tad by the door, vaping and watching him.

“Hey,” Adam says, voice scratchy. He clears his throat.

“Are you sick?”

“No.”

“What’s going on with you?”

Adam shrugs helplessly. “Life?” He looks down, scrapes his shoe against the brushed concrete.

“Fair. What’s going on with you and Lynch?”

Adam feels like he’s trying to run in a dream. Ronan hasn’t been in school for a month. What was Tad even talking about? “Nothing.” He feels Ronan’s disdain for his own lie. He reminds himself of Ronan’s warnings about Declan, his father, and here was Adam Parrish. Just another liar in his life.

“Come on, Adam. We could see it from a mile away. The way he looks at you. The way you look back.”

Adam cannot speak, shakes his head down at the ground, at himself. He doesn’t know.

“Or I could anyway.”

He meets Tad’s eyes again. “What are you implying?”

Tad stares through his vapor cloud. “You really don’t know what I’m getting at here?”

Adam thinks he has an idea given how much more frequently Tad pulls on his pen.

“I had hoped…but not Lynch.”

Adam takes a step back, heel off the edge of the top step. He felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. “It was never gonna be you and me.” He’s grateful for the honesty that unabashedly floods his mouth like saliva.

“Well, fuck you too, man,” Tad says, expressionless, pockets his vape. He turns to the door, seemingly unaffected by admitting to Adam what he was. “Coming back in?”

Adam is shaken by the idea that his closest friend has noticed his feelings for Ronan. The secret didn’t even matter. He can’t go back in there. He starts walking off the campus, around the school, down the block. The car is still at the Aglionby parking lot, but he couldn’t stop walking.

He’d asked Ronan not to do this to them. But he got it now. His words have no power over Ronan anymore, nothing he can say will get Ronan to respond to his texts. He wondered once if there had been an implicit limit when Ronan had told him he could do anything to him. This is it, Adam realizes. Adam had not safeguarded the trust Ronan had given him—no, he’d _violated_ it. And Ronan couldn’t let him keep doing it. That’s why Ronan had told him to leave. Adam backed them into this corner. How could they continue after he’d all but admitted that keeping up the lie was preferable to seeing Ronan in public?

Adam calls him. It goes to voicemail.

“ _This is Ronan,”_ is all the greeting message offers. Adam gasps at the sound of his voice before the beep. He’s quiet while he gathers himself.

"I miss you. You probably don’t want to talk to me. Well, I know you don’t.” He sits in the quiet, trying to imagine Ronan breathing next to him. “But there’s no one else I can talk to like you.”

It crashes down on him and he can’t breathe. He fucked up. He really fucked up.

He hangs up and goes home without saying bye to anyone. 

There were so many things wrong with this. From every angle he tried to look at it and justify it, the mind fuckery of it, Ronan would say. The enormity of his mistake presses in on him. He has lost hours. Persephone has tried talk to him about it. He thinks about how many times she has tried to breach his flooding anxiety, words spoken and lost to the cacophony of static in his ear. He has an illogical thought that, all this time, she had only been a dream. But he finds her, just as she always is, so blessedly unchanging, sitting curled up in her chair with a cup of tea between her hands as she watches an embarrassingly romantic movie.

She looks up, putting on a conciliatory smile for him. “How was it?”

Adam puts his arms out at his sides, at a loss. “A dance?” But something hitches in his chest, and he is crying, ridiculously _crying._ He hears her set down her cup. He finds himself at the foot of her chair, head resting on her lap as she strokes his hair and that makes him cry harder.

Adam had never thought about it before: _Am I happy?_ Now, he feels as though there is a distinct deficit inside him, a hollowed out wound that he couldn’t look at, for it was too gruesome to think about how he’d treated Ronan and for what? He supposes if you could determine your happiness in direct contrast to your lack of happiness, your emptiness, or black matter, then at this moment no, he was not happy.

The most problematic aspect of shattering what he’d expected to be bulletproof was not only that he was ‘unhappy’—Adam Parrish could handle ‘unhappy’—it was that he was a mess. He had no control over his body anymore, his every breath full of this suffocating, pressing darkness had turned him into a panicked creature, a small speck in an overlarge world.

That he can’t handle his shit anymore is made quite evident when Ronan suddenly reappears, showing up at Aglionby to drop off his uniform and books. Adam stops in his tracks, walking across the quad to Borden House. Ronan has Matthew in tow who gives Adam a smile that says both ‘sorry, pal’ and also ‘how could you hurt him, Adam?’ Adam starts shaking until he closes his eyes, trying to remember where he was going. He needs to find a bathroom. He needs to cram himself between one of the bleach-smelling toilets and the stall walls until this subsides.

Shaking all over, heart racing, he watches Ronan get farther and farther away. He has to close his eyes, take a breath to remind himself he is still alive, that he would survive this. And he does survive seeing Ronan in that moment like he has survived so many things.

For months after, when his thoughts get so bad and closing his eyes and breathing isn’t enough, he imagines Ronan’s body on top of his, the solid weight of him, holding Adam on that edge of not quite getting a good breath. But then he circles back again to how he would never feel Ronan’s comforting weight again, would never have Ronan offer control up to Adam, because he’d broken the trust between them, delicate as blown glass. He understands that.

He just can’t understand how he is supposed to accept it, move on from it, _live_ with it.


	8. Epitaph

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m sorry (not sorry muhaha) for making everyone sad on that last one and hopefully...this one(?), but I hope to achieve heretofore combustible levels of UST when our boys finally reconnect. This is where that slow burn comes in ya’ll. I have been keeping in mind my lovely predecessors who penned [What Stays and What Fades Away](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8596933?view_full_work=true) and [New Found, Middle Ground](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16497893/chapters/38639288). These are the works that made me eager to write these post break up scenes in this AU, where Ronan and Adam have to navigate each other, both being a little older, a little wiser. And yet, while I was excited to write theses chapters, this chapter falls a little flat for me. I am not sure what it is but I have looked at it countless times and cannot pinpoint it, so eff it. Here goes.
> 
> Also, confession: there are a couple passages lifted directly from Normal People because they are so beautifully put and perfectly describe the mental and emotional place Adam is in here, especially that library scene which I found so gorgeous. So, because I feel guilty taking any credit for the beauty of these sentiments, the line "Unable to form such straightforward views..." is Sally Rooney's, as well as the ideas in the rest of that paragraph. Then, when Adam "leaves the library in a state of agitation" and likens the feeling literature gives him to the process with which he interacts with people paraphrases Rooney. There. Am I absolved?

Ronan knows something is off when Declan returns to the living room looking strained. He had left to another room for the conversation when he normally held his boring ass phone calls wherever, until Ronan was forced to leave or gag.

“What?” Ronan asks, laying on the couch, pretending not to look away from his book. In truth, his eyes stopped processing the words as soon as he heard Declan's voice drop a decibel as he walked out.

Declan taps his phone against his palm as a log glowing with internal fire dislodges and falls in the hearth. 

Ronan drops his book on his chest. “Fucking what? You look like a bird just shat on your precious car.”

“That was a buyer…of Dad’s. He…found out something was forged. The Hunsington. So he started looking at all of the other pieces Dad sold him. Five in total?” Declan sounds breathless. Though his eyes are unfocused, likely replaying the nuances of the conversation over in his mind, they’re rapidly moving across Ronan's face as though he’ll find any answers there.

Ronan has always wanted Declan to tell him the truth. He’d always rather the truth than any buffed lies that might make him feel better. So he is at least grateful for that in this moment.

He throws himself upward, swinging his feet to the floor. Tossing his book onto the coffee table, he rests his elbows on his knees, rubs his cheek with his knuckles, a habit to time how long he could go between shaving.

All at once, he knows what Declan’s idea of damage control will entail. “No.”

Declan sighs. “What?”

“I know what you’re going to say. You can take Matthew and get the fuck out of here, but I’m not leaving.”

In his best impression of an automaton, Declan says, “Sorry, but that’s non-negotiable.”

Ronan stands up, laughing to himself. Even he can hear the cruelty of it, the longing for a fight. “Yeah? You going to make me?”

“Don’t start, Ronan.”

“You gonna drag me out of here? Throw me in the trunk. Tow the BMW to your yuppie townhouse?”

A muscle works in Declan’s jaw. His entire face, even his eyes, look like they’re made of stone, and Ronan hates it. He hates that his brother can turn everything off. Or, fuck, maybe he really doesn’t feel any of this _._ But Ronan knows he does because he’s seen glimpses of it—Declan’s joy, his fury, his bottomless sorrow when Ronan woke up in the hospital.

“I’m not dealing with this right now.”

Ronan feels a stabbing pain of rage in his temple. “When were you planning to deal with it? After you uprooted us from our home? After you erased our childhood?” he throws his arms toward their dad’s office, where the boxes still stand, housing their parents’ arguments and whispers, every separation and reunion.

“And you _still_ think he’s a saint. Un-fucking-believable.”

Ronan crosses his arms over his chest, refusing to say a word. Whether Niall Lynch is a prick or not is a non-starter here; Ronan’s allegiance to his father will win against reason any day. This is what his arms tightening like bands over his chest says loud enough for them both to hear.

Declan’s composure finally breaks. “Oh, fuck off with that!”

Ronan’s lip curls. Declan looks up the stairs.

“Fine. You want me to be the bad guy. It’s what you always want, isn’t it? Then I’ll say it. If we stay here, then we’re all at risk to have our clocks cleaned by the same people who killed dad. You think I would consider this if I wasn’t worried about finding you or Matthew the same way you found Dad? Is that what you need to hear?”

Ronan strikes. Declan slaps his arm away and pushes him so that he falls back onto the couch. “So why don’t you just stand the fuck down and listen to me for once in your goddamn life, Ronan?”

He shoots back up, chest to chest with Declan. All he wants is the words to stop. He wants the brightening glance of a hit to the face, the temporary shutdown of a fist to the gut, the stimulating frenzy of a punch ending trajectory on the target. “Fucking terrorist.” Ronan’s stomach is turning itself inside out with everything he wants.

“Yeah, I’m a shit human being. Okay,” says Declan, falsely placating.

“You’re so worried about finding him the way Dad—” Ronan chokes here; his blow is too low for him to even get it all the way out—“but he’s going to end up like _me_ if you take _everything_ from him!” By everything, he means their home. He means the untarnished memory of their father. He means their entire childhood. As usual, words completely fail him. He can’t look Declan in the eye anymore. Everything converges on him at once. He lost Dad. He lost Adam. Now he is losing— _everything._

Declan grabs his arm when he turns away. Ronan jerks away, but Declan grabs him again, fingers digging into his jaw to turn his head.

“Don’t you _ever_ fucking threaten me with that again.” Declan’s voice is deathly low, his sclera is red and a tear has rolled rogue over his right cheekbone. He releases Ronan’s jaw, but his hold on his arm is immovable. “I’m just trying to keep us safe. Don’t you understand that?”

Ronan jerks out of his grip so hard that he feels an electric shock up his neck. They still at the sound of heavy footsteps on the floor directly above.

“Don’t say a word to him.” Declan’s voice is wrung out, defeated, and that is not at all what Ronan wanted from this. He has no fucking clue what he wants.

“Not my job,” he throws back on his way out of the living room. That’s his line. That’s what Declan expects of him. He comes to an agonizing realization, right there in the daisy yellow kitchen—the russet cutting board, the black cast-iron kettle the only things he can make out in passing— that if he doesn’t give Declan his usual brand of shittiness, Declan will fall apart.

Declan laughs nastily to himself. “That’s right,” he says, because that’s his line. At least one thing has gone exactly the way it should today.

He goes straight for Niall’s whiskey, not bothering with a glass. He's on the back patio, unable to recall the space of time between the two places. He hits the punching bag in a white rage. That Niall Lynch could put their family, their home at risk like this, enough to get him killed in the fucking driveway and then to leave them like sitting ducks, made him want to burn down the barn with all of his father's forgeries. He wants to throw all of the originals, the book of folktales, and every instrument he taught them on top of the pile. What was the point of anything if he wasn’t even watching their backs? His father wasn’t perfect, but Ronan had always wanted to believe he’d had a failsafe, some back-up switch to flip and make everything better. But that would require his dad to be like Declan, and they couldn’t be further apart than Tír na nÓg and the mortal world. He thinks that’s why Declan learned his very specialized set of skills in cleaning up messes. Ronan would know about Declan's expertise in this field, because he was always the biggest mess he had to clean.

The punching bag is no longer enough. He sets off through the fields, legs stumbling in their haste, feet bare on the frost-packed ground. He throws the door of the long barn aside so that it clatters along the warped rails and crashes to a stop. He upends everything he can in the shop, destroying all of the forgeries. Reverent and superstitious, he steers clear of the original pieces in the dusty pile and the scroll saw he keeps oiled and conditioned. 

Persephone Poldma agrees to watch over the house for them—Ronan had already asked that she not have Adam over. She had nodded, solemn, eyes so full of heartbreak it made him sick. They hire a hand to care for the animals, let the garden go fallow. Ronan suspects Declan has also hired some _muscle_ to keep an eye on it, utilizing his father’s coffee-stained rolodex no doubt. So now some guy was sitting in a champagne monstrosity of a vehicle just near the border of the Lynch family farm. Declan was always good at fail-safes. How had Ronan never seen it before, how much Niall had depended on him? How indispensable Declan was to all of them.

Life in Alexandria is a blur of days in and out of the surgical townhouse that Ronan can’t breathe in, trips to Great Falls were he wishes he could lose himself the way Matthew does staring at the waters, nights halfheartedly prowling the streets for trouble—never finding it—and some rare mornings, after he’s been awake all night, curling up next to his mother in her bed. 

Ronan’s nightmares change from the abstract dream terrors to constantly losing Adam, or, and these are somehow worse, never having him at all. Just his cool disdain at Ronan’s caustic behavior those first few times he and Adam interacted when he’d come for Persephone. They wax and wane into run of the mill dreams about being left alone by Declan and Matthew, of finding them in the driveway where he’d found his father. After these, he gets up in the middle of the night, feverish with lack of sleep, head foggy and throat dry, to look in on his mom and brothers. Just to ensure they’re still there. They’re real. That he’s not still dreaming. One of these nights, the floor creaks near Declan's bed when Ronan approaches to ensure he hasn't overdosed on Sleep-Aid. Declan must have just fallen asleep, because he easily wakes, sitting up, hand reaching beneath his pillow.

 _The gun,_ Ronan thinks, feeling flushed. 

"What's wrong?" Declan whispers. 

Ronan is already halfway to the door. "Stand down, soldier."

Just when the nightmares have thoroughly saturated his brain in Technicolor horror films and begin to fizzle out, Aurora Lynch quietly fades away with no help from either the stalemate between the brothers or a termination of her life support. Matthew would say it was because he hadn’t sat at her side enough—it would never occur to him to loop his brothers into this charge. Declan would say it’s because she’s been in a coma for almost a year; life is not made for suspension. People are meant to change and adapt and keep moving. Ronan knew the truth but he would never say it. It was a truth only one person needed to know and carry. She was tired of living in a dream. 

_“I’ll always come back to you. You are my loveliest love. The kindest and fairest creature I have made.”_

_Ronan didn’t bother to dispute that he was her ‘loveliest love’. They were all Aurora’s ‘loveliest love’. But he knows that last bit couldn’t be right. “Matthew is the kindest—”_

_“No, see. Matthew was plucked from a dream. Declan plucked from the center of a rose bush, thorns and jagged edged, cat-tongued leaves, and the softest, most vivid petals you’d ever felt or seen.”_

_Ronan remembers feeling lulled by the rhymes and the soft scent of bergamot and amber surrounding him while in Aurora's arms. He remembers her fine hair tickling his cheek as it fell from her braid._

_“But you were made of many parts, a piece torn like fresh bread from a raincloud in a dream, the greenest stem off the rose bush with the very best thorns for protecting itself, but also the tenderest part of the heart, with the trickery of the fae.”_

Losing her, the process of being orphaned, was so much harder here away from their family home, where the touch of a couch pillow or unsealed wooden frame could unlock a memory, where the walls had breathed in their tears and joy and awe, and the doorways marked the passage of time in feet and inches. 

They would lay Aurora to rest at their family plot beside their father. The service would be at St. Agnes, as all of their baptisms and their parents’ wedding had been. After an excruciatingly long drive, with only the sound of Declan's teeth grinding at returning and Matthew's whispered tears, and Ronan's unrepentant electronica in his ears to drown it all out, they were returned to the Lynch estate.

“I thought I’d read that today,” says Ronan, dropping a folded piece of notebook paper at Declan’s elbow. The blue lines look unaccountably cheery on this morning that none of them can eat. Ronan remembers copying the words into his blank notebook from Aglionby, after googling the random phrases that had stuck in his head— _watery hazes of hazel….I thought of that last honey by the water that no hive can find… brightness was drenching through the branches…_

Declan, who has asked that everything go through him prior to presenting, predictably, puts his foot down. 

“We’re supposed to be keeping our heads down, Ronan.” 

“It’s a fucking poem.”

“It’s you standing up there, sharing even a sliver of our childhood. _That_ is fodder.”

Ronan couldn’t understand how their mother’s funeral could mean so little to him. That he could even consider keeping it as impersonal as his relationships with his Rent-A-Girlfriends made his breath come short in his chest. He snatches the paper back. “Dad would have let me read it. He would have given a shit.”

“Of course he would have. Dad was recharged by worship,” says Declan, incredulous. “He would have let you do anything you wanted because we all know you were his biggest fan. You want to honor her with a poem that she inherited from Dad like all the other used shit he passed to us? Hell, she might not have even liked poetry if it hadn’t been for him shoving everything of _his_ down her throat. He never let her have a life!”

_We were her life._

Even as he thinks it, it feels untrue. Incongruous with reality. When his father would be gone for the longer stretches, he remembers seeing her standing at the window, looking out into the mist. Or she’d be cooking, dipping her finger into a pot then her mouth, before her hand would drop and she’d catch herself back against the island, chest rising in gasps, staring at nothing, until Ronan asked her what was wrong.

Declan’s uncharacteristic outburst makes sense now. He resents their father for trapping him in indentured servitude when he’d been alive, and now, he is left in the permanent role of caregiver. Still, the possibility that his mother hadn’t loved the poem she had orated to him when the nights he could not find the arms of sleep grew longer and longer was too big to swallow. While Ronan has resolved himself to disappointment on the matter of lies, now that Declan was the bearer of the family's history, it hurts to think the lullaby she’d given him in those lines might not have been _hers_.

“Please,” Matthew says in a very un-Matthew way—that is to say, a future echo of himself, older and somber, that made Ronan want to upend the table.

They do not know whether he is beseeching them to stop fighting or pleading on Ronan's behalf to be allowed the reading. The elder Lynch brothers do not look at one another and painstakingly keep all further opinions to themselves. Neither Ronan nor Declan were ever particularly good with delaying, let alone circumventing, the ecstatic release of emotions not meant to survive in the apocalyptic atmosphere of a Lynch through a brawl.

His mother's funeral is a surreal echo of his father's. He stands, unapproachable, with one hand in his pocket and his arm around Matthew, bracketing his shoulders against his side. It unnerves Ronan how still he is, hands clasped in front of him, curls hanging from his downturned head. He can tell it unnerves Declan too, since he keeps glancing back at them between solemnly shaking the attendees’ hands. It is exactly where they were standing, and what they’d been doing, 12 months ago. The holy water in the font is still stale. The Christ on the crucifix still gazes, censorious, at Ronan. The archway they stand beneath still has the same shadows in the farthest depths. The hymns still sound ghostly and ineffectual when raised up in acknowledgement of a loved one's passing—their mother's passing. 

He is inundated with memories. His brain cannot be convinced that he will never again see her laugh or swat at them when they repeat one of Niall’s vulgar jokes. All hope is gone that they could go to her and she will know exactly what to say to comfort their myriad ails of the body and heart.

He finds himself looking at pictures, hates his own innocence in them, ignorant of what was to come. He hates how much he resembles his father because he is dead. He corners Declan in the bathroom when he’s flossing one night—no time to hide in Neiman Marcus pants and soft gray T shirt. Declan looks vexed by the intrusion into his space. Ronan drops down to the cabinet, extracting the clippers that came with some random bathroom stuff from the house. He pops the guard off and lays them on the edge of the counter before straddling the toilet. 

“All of it?” asks Declan. 

Ronan puts his arms up on the tank and drops his head forward. 

After, he gets up to go get the broom, probably some sleek number Declan has in a pantry on a special hook somewhere. As he passes his brother, wrapping the cord, body weighted down with some unnatural force, Declan says his name.

Ronan stops, looks back at him.

“Stay with me.”

Ronan knows what he means.

He remains in his room in the townhouse more often than not. Matthew ambles in to play video games with him. Declan begrudgingly stands at his door to tell him dinner is ready or to brush his teeth or to ‘please, for the love of God, Ronan, change your clothes.’ But most of the time, he lays in his bed, staring up at the immaculate ceiling, unlike the familiar cracked ceiling of the Barns. Now, just for the novelty of changing up his routine, he rolls over the side of the bed to reach for his book Adam had found for him all those months ago. Just as his fingers brush the book's soft-worn edges, he lets it go, climbs back onto his bed, resumes staring at the ceiling.

***

Adam rooms with someone named Cheng at a house called Litchfield. Quite a few people room here, but it is always quiet and still at night, which is more than Adam could have hoped for. It is surprisingly immaculate for the number of people he sees milling about at various intervals; he suspects this militant orderliness is the doing of the landlady, whom Henry says ‘rules with an iron fist gnarled by arthritis, but no less threatening’. Adam has seen her sliding through the doorways like a silent ship with lighthouse eyes that pick out your every ill intention or mistake, such as not washing your hands after eating that dumpling with your fingers, at Henry’s insistence! Henry was always getting him into trouble with Mrs. Wu. 

When Adam had first seen the house, its worn clapboards and clean paint, its lemon and linseed scented floors, its doilies and threadbare velvet armchair, he loved it. Not instantly. It was a love that came in waves, wave upon wave that each reminded him more of home. His love for it, for the safehaven it gave him while attending an ivy league so far from home, was a continuous, living thing. 

The rat, Henry and the others had told him on his first night at Litchfield House, has been Mrs. Wu’s great adversary for the last twenty years. 

“Rats don’t—”

“Live that long?” Henry had interrupted him. “This one does. This one defies the expectations of its species, like Mrs. Wu herself.” He somehow emerged from the depths of the closet smoothing his hair, not down but back up. The impossible physics of it—the sheer height to which Henry’s hair aspired—made Adam’s mind melt. “A more worthy opponent could not be found,” Henry assures him. Adam is unsure whether he is referring to Mrs. Wu or the Rat.

They’re looking for it now, an impossible task Mrs. Wu charged them with (punishment for the hand-washing incident) and Adam had been resigned to fail. However, after finding rat droppings staining his Irish Folktales that had fallen to the floor after he’d fallen asleep last night, it was personal. He had not believed the possibility of its existence among these scoured halls until he’d seen the evidence littering the pages of the book he always turns to when he misses… something he can't quite name. Not Ronan or the house he lives in with Persephone but…home, the concept of it. 

“I am told,” says Henry, half of his person beneath Adam’s bed now. For some reason, Adam feels guilty about the amorphous layer of dust and hair coating the hardwood in a jagged rectangle where Mrs. Wu had not been able to reach in her ritualistic scouring. “This rat is so large, it carried away the real Henry Cheng as a baby and put an ungrateful, bad mannered changeling in his place.”

Adam laughs. He sits up from looking under the nicked chest of drawers dividing the two sides of their room, phone flashlight coldly shining into the cranny. He isn’t ridiculous enough to think they’d _see_ the fabled rat. He was hoping, rather, to find an entry point into the wall where they could lay a trap (despite the universally recognized facts that Mrs. Wu set glue traps, snap traps, and even a bear trap for the elusive abomination of a rodent).

“But—so this is your house?”

“Yes,” says Henry, shimmying out from under Adam’s bed. Adam will not be the one to break it to him, but Henry Cheng has no hope of ever sneaking up on The Legendary Adversary of Mrs. Wu; he has as much subtlety as Madonna’s “Like a Prayer”.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” 

Adam remembers another time, just weeks after his arrival, standing at the window, looking through the frothy white curtains down at the street below.

“I wonder who owns the Fisker.” His mouth had actually watered for the far-off future toward which he tirelessly worked.

“Oh, that,” Henry says, coming to stand next to him at the window. He sighs heavily, forlornly admits, “that’s mine.”

“Why the hell are you riding to class with me?” Adam had laughed. 

Though Adam would never call his car a shitbox out of pride, he inwardly considered it so. And the fact that Henry had seemed like he might be another poor student until learning the Fisker was his and that this was Cheng’s family’s house is too much to take in stride. It hits him, right then, with Henry staring down at his $100,000 car with disdain, how very alone he is here. 

Adam doesn’t care for omitted truths or half-truths. A remnant of knowing—he couldn’t think of him. He parcels the name, the mental conjuring of the bearer, out for seldom, solitary moments. In these moments, he obsessively turns over the good times and, more often, the last few twisted moments in his head, torturing himself with all the ways he got it wrong. He remembers, with a visceral wracking of agony, seeing his tie fall out of his locker a few days after Ronan had told him to leave. _Relinquo._ He’d heard the word in Ronan’s razor sharp graveled voice when he’d seen the tie on the floor, dredging up thousands of seconds of impossible bliss. He’d felt himself at a steep pitch, like the sudden declension of adrenaline, a feeling of nausea-tainted withdrawal settling into his cells. 

He remembers wishing on a dandelion as a child. He’d only done it once. He had put so much useless hope and will into those windborne seeds. That’s what he felt as _tanquam alter idem_ played on a loop through his head. He had mistakenly, irresponsibly released the other half of himself adrift on the wind, and now he had to figure out a way to go on as before. Before The Barns, the E24, the picture of a laughing queen and a sleeping beauty deferred, Niamh and Pluer, the story of a boy who could take things out of his dreams, the stern cut of Declan and the flapping, gusting happiness of Matthew at the borders, and Ronan, burning bright and merciless at the center of everything. 

He’d gone over this enough times to understand that an omitted truth was how he’d irreparably destroyed the holy thing he and Ronan had. He could have said something, anything. 

_I don’t know how this should look._

_I don’t know how to be someone other than I’ve always been._

_I don’t know how to be good enough for you._

_I am afraid._

In the end, he didn’t have to figure out how to say any of that. He never had a chance. And he could not fault Ronan for not giving him one. 

Adam stands, dusting his hands on his pants. He opens his mouth to say something, but his throat is too tight to get any words out. He feels pathetic for allowing this to still affect him the way that it did all summer long.

“Okay, Adam Man?”

Adam nods. He walks to the old fashioned bathroom down the hall. The clawfoot tub, the almost bone colored sink on a porcelain pillar rather than jutting out from the wall. The high window at the far end of the narrow space, warm morning light hitting the walls of the bathroom in leopard print through the lace of trees. 

It had been nearly seven months. Adam was still a balled up piece of notebook paper, trying to flatten himself back out. He pressed and pressed, unsure if the creases would ever smooth out. 

Adam is working on his car in front of Litchfield. It was not the kind of street one saw shitboxes being worked on, but he wasn’t being too trailer trash about it. He didn’t have it up on blocks at least. Just a tune up and oil change. He’d already gotten the worst of it out of the way, watching the oil drain out with the cobble of the asphalt pressing into the back of his skull and Henry’s shoes visible at the curb where he sat in some sort of warped sense of fraternal comradery. 

Now he leans over the engine block, checking the other fluids. “You could help, you know,” he says, standing straight and rubbing at the tension in his right shoulder. 

“I wouldn’t know a thing. It’s a good thing you’re the owner of this…vehicle.” He gestured uncertainly in the direction of the Hondayota.

Adam kicked at his shoe. Henry rubbed the scuff with this thumb. 

“Besides, why would I need to learn how to do this when I have you?”

Adam tries not to let it sting, the idea ingrained in his blood that he owes anyone anything. _Poor. Trash. Charity._ Especially when he pays rent for his half of the room, fair and square. But it turns out, that money, in turn, goes back into Henry’s pocket. 

“You are the expert, are you not?”

“I guess,” says Adam. His tone is a bit sulking.

“Then why that look of constipation?”

A laugh explodes out of Adam. A girl riding by on her bike gawks at him. After she passes, he pats his hair on instinct, glancing down at his shirt which is hopeless. 

“It’s because you’re hot,” Henry says in a tone like he is breaking terrible news.

Now, he scoffs. The strange thing is, despite how much wider his experience, he feels categorically less attractive than he had at Aglionby. He isn’t sure where it comes from, as he’d had no issues with garnering interest among his peers and even, one awkward night, an elder. 

The summer had been a combination of reading everything on his syllabi that he could get his hands on, rejoining his friends at parties, and getting laid. He’d plunged back into his friends and parties, trying to return to his life before Ronan, except he was hungrier for touch, for the freedom he’d experienced with Ronan that he was more proactive about seeking out sexual partners. People he slept with once at least, sometimes more depending on how long he could fool himself into believing he would be fine, that nothing was missing, that he really didn’t need sex anyway. But that was the thing about getting laid versus what they had; one was inherently selfish, but with Ronan, he had actually given away entire chunks of self and the experience, the return, had been so much _more_. 

More than the sex, he missed the pleasure of just sharing a physical space with him. He could not recreate the completion he’d felt when it was Ronan’s hand at his hip, holding him to his side in bed or sitting on the couch together. The pads of his fingers skimming the dip at the back of Adam’s neck, or their shoulders jostling as they walked side by side, or Ronan’s foot, elegant and undeniably male, nudging his leg across a sea of unmade bedcovers while Adam did homework and Ronan listened to music in the desk chair. 

After sleeping with Rachel, (because without Ronan in the picture that was an inevitability), Adam tried to convince himself that there was something, anything, that he’d sacrificed everything for. But there wasn’t, and it ended fairly quickly. He even had sex with a guy he met at the bar—after dodging some uncomfortable advances from his former English teacher, Mrs. Neary—and felt feverishly ill with himself after. Retrospectively, he had associated the mind-blowing sex he’d had with Ronan, where he felt competent and worshipped and fulfilled, with being intimate period. Being touched. And being able to touch without reservation. Now, he knew the unshakable truth: Maybe it was a myth if his own making, but it was _Ronan_ that had made him feel fulfilled and not like an imposter inside his own skin, not sex or even the electric power that filled him when Ronan submitted. 

Would he have someone new now? And if he did, did he ever think of Adam? He certainly saw Ronan’s face every time he’d been with anyone else. But it was so much more invasive, this attachment to Ronan. It had set down roots in his chest, and he had no hope of weeding it out.

Of course he wondered whether Ronan ever came here to his brother’s townhouse. He wondered if he’d somehow see him on the residential street a few miles from the university. He had stupidly hoped Ronan would seek him out on campus, so that he was chasing ghosts in every alcove and stairwell of his lovely school. But Ronan was just that. A ghost. A time in his life less than a year past, where he felt…not only happiness but wholeness. Completed. Awake. 

In school, he had not wanted to show who he really was, the person he’d been with Ronan, because that was not part of the mass-manufactured personality of Aglionby. He understood now, and saw with painful clarity, that he had been weak.

God, he was trying not to think about him, but he couldn’t help it. How do you not think about someone you almost shared the same mind with? He had reached inside of Adam and shown him components he hadn’t known were there. The most logical way he could think of it was owning a vehicle all of your life, and never knowing that there was a V8 under the hood. The truest way he could think of it was that Ronan was the most beautiful thing Adam had ever touched, inside and out. He was a fusion reactor. A sonic boom. An aurora borealis. How do you not think about a nebula if you once held it in your hands? 

He needed to stop torturing himself like this. Fortunately classes at an ivy league were a thorough distraction from anything other than homework, work, eat, sleep, and the great—and fruitless—rat hunt. 

He hadn’t really worried about being without or being poor at Aglionby. He was rational; Rome was not built in a day. He had ignored the designer shoes and shiny new model cell phones. And the entire school had known he was the scholarship student. When he’d made a name for himself as the burgeoning valedictorian, no one seemed to remember or care that scholarships had paid his way. But here at Georgetown, the student body is a cliché _en masse_ of Ivy League students. All of them look like a glossy brochure promising 100% graduation rate and 401ks after graduation. Back home, in small town Virginia, it had been easy enough to pretend that his and Persephone’s microcosm of frugality had been more than enough. But here, stripped of his friends, of the reputation he’d worked so hard for, he felt dingy and raw. He thought of that decoy duck at the Barns. The student body obviously had money and somehow still pulled off casual apathy with their designer clothes better than his literally casual jeans and T-shirts. He liked the old world ivy league look of gentleman's clubs and Dead Poet's Society, but he would feel like an ass if he dressed as such. 

He adjusts to university as that solitary boy he was in his old life before Persephone. No one cares though, which is dispiriting and a relief. Except during his seminar classes. He can't hide in anonymity there. 

“Adam Parrish.”

He looks up to find the professor looking at him. The rest of the class follows suite. 

“What did you think of this passage?” she asks kindly.

What he finds most fascinating about the novel _Persuasion_ is Anne Elliot. That she is an isolated, estranged character, learning to depend on her own judgements rather than those who have persuaded her before, and he feels a strange kinship with her. 

Even thinking of saying this aloud is excruciating. 

“I think…Anne’s inner struggle shows a movement into more modern heroines like in Henry James’s work. She feels like a very modern character. People can relate to someone who feels devalued by society, for whatever reason—” he is painfully aware he says this with dirty Converse and a T-shirt with a stretched neck--"in this case, with no husband’s name in the baronetage and her age, she has been deemed worthless by most.” 

The professor stares at him and, eventually, nods with a light smile. She moves on to someone else who waxes poetic for ten straight minutes about the Napoleonic Wars. Which yes, Adam sees how it helps shape Austen’s commentary, that you can’t read any fiction in a vacuum, but it's also such a sterile view of the novel. 

Unable to form such straightforward views or express them with any force, Adam begins to understand why all the discussions are so abstract despite the passion and confidence with which they are conducted. He now sees why he feels so alienated from his classmates, who are showing up to heatedly discuss books they have not read—because he _is_ alienated. They are a different species or phylum or class or order which can deploy diaphanous opinions, without ever referencing the actual text, completely unconcerned as to how they will be perceived by others.

It is in the library later that he inwardly embraces his true purpose here, curled in a chair near one of the obsidian windows as he reads:

_Anne found an unexpected interest here. She felt its application to herself, felt it in a nervous thrill all over her, and at the same moment that her eyes instinctively glanced towards the distant table, Captain Wentworth’s pen ceased to move, his head was raised, pausing, listening, and he turned round the next instant to give a look — one quick, conscious look at her._

Adam feels that look like a gunshot. Neither the she nor Wentworth have even glanced at the other until subject of conversation breeches engagements and young people listening to the advice of their elders. The tension mounts to this point where Wentworth has finally acknowledged Anne in the way the heroine and reader have been hoping for. Adam’s head is buzzing just as Anne’s.

When the library closes, he leaves in a state of agitation, having to close his book on the part where it may be revealed that Wentworth still cares for Anne. Walking to the parking lot, he glances back at the library’s liquid amber windows warming the cold darkness, its strange, timeless architecture. He feels ridiculous for being so invested, but now that he is here, pursuing English as his course of study, it is more clear than ever and satisfyingly justifiable: he is moved by stories and literature. The feeling _Persuasion_ provokes in him when Wentworth drops his pen, stopped in his tracks by Anne’s charge that female emotions are more steadfast, reminds him that his reaction to literature is a similar faculty to what he uses in understanding people, in opening himself up to others. In intimacy.

When he returns to Litchfield House, he goes straight to his room to continue the scene.

_I can no longer listen in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me that I am not too late, that such precious feelings are gone forever. I offer myself to you with a heart even more your own than when you broke it almost eight years and a half ago…_

After he has set the book down to digest this revelation, this joining of the story’s climax and Anne’s completed character arc, Henry strides in and sets about his task of organizing Adam’s bookshelf by color despite Adam’s insistence when he’d initiated the task that he’ll never find anything like that. Henry had replied, “You’ll have to memorize the colors, because before my progress, this was a tragedy of home décor”. Adam quickly surrendered. He had silently vowed to reorganize them by subject some other day but found that he actually really likes the way it’s coming along. It is an entertaining coincidence that Henry is talking about someone in one of his classes of whom he is envious for the way he speaks his mind. 

“Yeah, I know the feeling.”

“You too have issues with translating your thoughts into words?” 

“Not exactly. More like…I don’t even know what I’m thinking to say anything.” But he realizes as he says this, that he’d never shared this with anyone, never even admitted it to himself. 

Henry looks surprised. 

“It’s stupid.”

“No. No it’s not.”

He is grateful that he can speak openly with someone about this, that they finally graduated from solely discussing the utilities or carpooling (which means Adam driving them and Henry giving him gas money).

He feels a strange peace settle over him as he watches Henry, sitting on the floor, his designer pants pulled up above his ankles, revealing royal purple socks with some small gold pattern on them. “The young man in my class, the one so good with his words—good words too, like…crossword puzzle answers or…something you would find in a book with footnotes for god’s sake—he invited me to a party this weekend.” 

“Nice.” Adam is eager to return to his assignment, hoping Henry gets the hint. 

“I would like for you to come with me, Car Man.”

Adam snorts his soda. “What. Is Car Man?”

“It’s how I refer to you in my mind.” He turns at Adam’s silence. “What? You don’t have a special way you refer to me in your mind?”

“Can’t say that I do, Cheng.”

“You’re squirrely, Car Man.”

Adam smirks.

“I also refer to you as Secret Agent Man.” 

“You refer to me a lot, do you?” Adam asks drily. He senses Henry is messing with him just to get him to respond. 

“You are my roommate. It would be undue of me not to have shorthand nicknames for you to remind me of your foremost characteristics. I am just telling you how it is.”

“And what does Secret Agent Man mean?”

“It means that I think you know exactly what you think and want but you are too afraid to think it or want it aloud.”

Adam has read of character’s going pale, their faces turning ashen. He can feel his skin do this in reverse. Filling with color, with shame and exposure and fear at being known. No. At someone knowing something about him that _he_ hadn’t even known. 

“You’d think if you call someone Secret Agent Man, it would be a little cooler than that.”

“Truth is truth, man. But no bad blood.”

On the phone with Persephone later that week, she asks him how his classes are going.

“It’s…a lot of reading. Papers. Group projects,” he frowns. “And more reading.”

“You should have no problem then.”

“Come on, you know I’ve never been the group project type, at least.”

“That is your perception. I seem to remember there were quite a few people who were interested in doing projects with you at Aglionby. And you felt as though you didn’t belong there as well.”

“Stop being so perceptive. It’s annoying,” he says, knowing that they’re both smiling. These shared moments of understanding are all the more decadent because they do not share the same blood, because their bond was formed by choice.

He’s been fiddling with his tarot cards. He takes them out whenever he misses home. Sometimes he will pull one before the day starts, right after his alarm goes off, before his logical mind has fully awoken to sabotage his intuition with reason. He keeps pulling The Knight of Wands, even after three shuffles. He realizes it as soon as he sees it the first time—it’s Ronan. This card feels warm every time he picks it up to shuffle it back into the deck. 

“Sometimes the cards will pick up on what you want.”

Adam threw them down and falls back against his pillows. 

“I miss you,” he says in as firm and steady a voice as he could manage.

“Mmmm.”

“I miss my room.”

“Mmmm.”

“I miss pie for dinner.”

“Mmmm.”

He laughs but feels an uncomfortable pinch somewhere in the vicinity of his heart, the constant fear of rejection slamming through him. 

“Stop saying ‘mmmm’.”

“It seems to me you are lingering too much on old experiences, when you should be out, acquiring new ones.”

“Mmmm,” he hums, and could practically hear Persephone smiling down the phone at him. 

“You’ve always seemed a very proactive person to me,” she says, as though this disjointed thought explains everything. 

“Thanks?” He feels bad, but he doesn’t know why. The not knowing was the worst part of it. She is right of course. “Persephone—”

“I think you need to go to that party you’re roommate invited you to and stop laying in your bed, staring at the ceiling.”

He sits up and petulantly pulls at a loose thread in the quilt. “Why?”

“Why not?”

He rolls his eyes.

When he and Persephone get off the phone, he notices the cards have slid over one another in a seemingly random disarray. He flips over the closest one. Knight of Swords. His card. There is another card, tucked just under the corner of this one. It feels warm under his hand. Instead of looking at it, he flips the Knight of Swords back over and compresses them all into a neat stack. He puts them away in his bedside drawer and returns to his paper on Saussure.


	9. Like thunder under earth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man, your comments and bookmarks, guys. They are seriously the nectar of the gods. Also, this story has surpassed 4,000 hits. I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around the fact that this story I conceived of in the dead heat of summer last year has been clicked on by 4,000 Pynch-hungry souls like myself--granted, only the cool kids stayed for more ;) But, in all seriousness, it's mindblowing and rewarding and I seriously love all of you for reading this, for letting me entertain you. It is an honor. I hope this chapter, which has seriously been a blood-letting from a peach pit, shows all of my gratitude and love.
> 
> Note on the chapter title: Totally a shout out to one of my favorite fics by Laumonie and for NFWMB, the Hozier song the title introduced me to

Then came Richard Gansey III, or Dick, as Ronan affectionately referred to him, and his pocket-sized girlfriend Blue Sargent—though she claimed that term was diminutive, whatever the fuck that meant, and mussy haired Noah who seemed immune to Ronan’s blackest moods and even had the strange power to lift him out of them. Sometimes. This was how it happened.

He met Blue first. Here’s the scene: A party Declan had made him attend for Congresswoman Gansey, because nothing could be more advantageous for one’s reputation than hauling the orphaned brothers in your charge to political events. Everywhere he looks are people turned out in their serious blue, classic black, and either ivory or ruby, depending on one’s affinity for blood. There are limpid wrists occupying themselves with supporting weightless crystal flutes of airy liquid. There are caterers costumed like penguins, more uppity than the laughing, easy guests.

Ronan is not feeling particularly agreeable about being dressed up and paraded around like a cutout doll of Misfortune and Grief and Determination In the Face of Adversity. Because even though the brothers Lynch _were_ grieving men of misfortune, the thought of parading this in front of these people so far from their own experiences as to render them extraterrestrial to the living Lynch’s was so horrific that Ronan wanted to claw himself free of his own skin. He wanted out of this moment in their collective life, the life that felt too heavy and too slick at the same time, the life they shared of Niall and Aurora, the Barns, the days memory has elongated and fused of running their property like kings of old, and now the townhouse and the heroism of their clenched-jaw dinners together like captains going down with their ship. But just like the idea of clawing himself free that emerges like a sapling in even smiling moments would undoubtedly hurt Matthew, so too would him leaving this party. And just like that he is rooted where he stands.

As these spiraling thoughts gun him down, someone next to him fortuitously mutters, “Fuck Washington.” It was so quiet he isn’t sure he heard her right. When he looks to his left, he has to practically crane his neck to see her, and then he cannot even be sure whether she was the one who spoke. It’s a girl—possibly young woman? He didn’t know they made them that small. She has an argument of antique-looking hair combs restraining her spiky hair. She wears a silky black bomber jacket over a fairy-looking dress in Vintage Rose. The effect of the combination is strange and Ronan doesn’t get it. But the combs sorely remind him of the ones his mom sometimes used to sweep back her hair on one side while she chopped wood or kneaded bread.

“What…” he shakes his head, tries again. “What _are_ you?”

She glares up at him. “What are _you_?”

“Fucking…” He shrugs in closing, as though the answer is obvious.

She mimics his response. “Well, there you go.”

They fall into a strangely comfortable silence. Until she deigns to break it again with her admittedly nice voice that reminds him of home: the southern cadence that he and his brothers somehow never ended up with between their father’s bastardized brogue and their mother’s aristocratic enunciation.

“I’m being a surly wallflower. I feel like this is the only way I can show my disdain for the system without upsetting Gansey.”

“What’s a Gansey?”

“My…partner,” the tiny woman says, somehow sounding chagrined and undecided. Ronan fleetingly worries if he looks into her eyes too long he might turn to stone. “You don’t know Gansey?”

“No.”

His reply takes the winds out of her sails. He can almost see the fluttering bits of the gauzy dress deflate. “Oh. I thought everyone here knew him.”

Ronan makes no expression.

“I’m Blue.”

“What’s a Blue?” Now he is fucking with her.

“I'm--you know what? You are aggravating!”

Her huffing makes it very worth the effort.

“You know what?” He repeats.

She looks like she’s about to take off her boot—eerily similar to his—and throw it at his head. He feels like laughing. This is very in her favor, given that it has been months since Ronan parted with a laugh that wasn’t glazed in cruelty.

“There isn’t a word for ‘blue' in ancient Greek.”

She takes a breath then blows it out in a way that makes him think she often has to do that to keep her hair out of her face. But it’s all tidily pinned back, so the breath seems pointless—but so does laughing and here he is, wanting to laugh.

“Oh,” she says, furrowing her brow, looking out over the crowd. “Well, that’s just…I never knew that.”

“Probably not common knowledge, Maggot. Just thought I’d share.”

“Ex _cuse_ —”

“Excuse me?” This was a honeyed southern voice cutting off what would surely be an entertaining tirade. They both turn to see an athletically built young man in a suit that was certainly cut by an Italian designer for this promising young man’s measurements to the centimeter.

Immediately, Ronan rolls his eyes up to the ceiling and drops even more decidedly into the wall, the back of his skull soundly finding it.

“Would you help me move this table?”

“And why wouldn’t you ask me? Because he has nearly two feet on me? I’m perfectly capable of moving a table.”

Ronan begrudgingly catches the guy's affectionately bemused or bemusedly affectionate smile.

“I was asking the both of you. It’s quite a heavy table—antique.”

Ronan unlatches himself from the wall. “Where is it?”

On the way there, Ronan is surprised to learn this is Blue's Gansey as he explains his mother noticed the table was taking quite a beating from the caterers, and once Congresswoman Gansey offhandedly mentions something, it was as good as an order to take care of it. And really, he explains to his followers who share a conspirator’s look behind him, it was in their best interest to take care of it or it would forever season not only the rest of the party but every future reference to this night--" _It was a lovely table. Such a shame_.”

They successfully locate the table in question—18th century in Adam style, of course—and position themselves to move it down the wall away from the doorway through which the caterers are trundling. Ronan has to admit, they look pretty harassed.

“God, Gansey,” says Blue—Ronan still isn’t sure whether he’s supposed to believe this is her name. “What is this thing made of? Solid oak?”

“Mahogany,” says Ronan. Gansey and Blue appraise him as they try to stretch their furled fingers.

The evening has progressed to this: Gansey is discussing Owain Glyndŵr and how his search for the Welsh king has led him to believe he is buried along something called the ley line in Virginia. Ronan leans against the wall beside Matthew who has gotten a hold of a champagne flute and bears two apples high on his cheeks.

“That's right near us!” says Matthew, smile inexhaustible.

Gansey turns his bright gaze on Ronan. And Ronan has to admit, he feels something lifelike stirring inside of him to be so plainly regarded after his time at Aglionby.

“Is that right?” he asks without a hint of sarcasm. His face is completely open in a way that reminds Ronan of Matthew. “Do you live there?”

“Not now,” says Ronan carefully, quick glance at Matthew, bucking against Declan’s gaze over Gansey’s head. “We’re from Singer’s Falls.”

“Remarkable. Coincidence?” Gansey asks genuinely, rubbing his bottom lip with his thumb. Ronan has to look away. By the end of the evening, Blue and Gansey have looped Ronan, and his brothers too if they want, into their Friendsmas exchange without his interest or permission.

“Dial in? For Dial In?”

An incensed, pygmy tornado snatches the cup from his hand.

“Give me that! Dylan,” Blue calls out in her customer service voice, which is _way_ different than the fury she hath just unleashed upon him. “Your Caramel macchiatto is ready.”

After Dylan retrieves his order with a strange look at the very long degenerate draped over the serving counter, Blue turns to the very long degenerate in question. Ronan stares back.

“Stop smirking.”

They have come to the point in their acquaintance where she knows his usually downturned mouth sitting straight is as good as laughter.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“It wasn’t even funny.”

“I thought it was funny,” says Noah. Ronan has learned this is Blue's best friend after Gansey. Noah recently moved out of his parent's house and in with Gansey. Ronan could not imagine two people being more different. “Wait until he does it to all of _your_ customers.”

Noah and Ronan exchange a look that Blue intercepts. The look says: Ronan has literally done this to all of Noah's customers when Blue was otherwise occupied.

She furiously cleans a counter with a graying rag. “Can you, like…buy something so that I don’t get fired for you pretending to work here?”

He doesn’t move from the pick-up counter, only now he’s leaning back against elbows on it, staring out the window. Too early in the season, a leaf falls from one of the trees outside and slides down through the branches and over the other leaves. It’s only just turning. Ronan wonders if it’s the first to lose its grip and fall.

“Fine. Give me an Americano.”

He can practically feel Blue’s suspicious glare because he never drinks coffee; there’s an itch somewhere in the vicinity of his shoulder blade. He hears her sigh and waits for her to walk away. Tell him to take a hike. Decide he isn't worth her time.

The fancy chrome apparatus begins to whir efficiently, and he lets out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. He stares at the mostly empty seating area, thinks about Gansey coming in with a different book on Welsh history every other day. That was how Gansey had met Blue and Noah they told him. Noah had been the only person who bothered listening to Gansey’s exhaustive monologs about his reading material. Which was perfect, according to Blue, since no one really knew what Noah's job description entailed anyway. Well, Blue listened too, despite her posturing, Noah had told Ronan in a stage whisper.

Ronan listens to the comforting sound of the two of them moving behind the counter like shipmates. He wishes Gansey were here as well, but he had class today. Their long drowsy summer days at Gansey's warehouse were abbreviated now and decidedly cooler. He already misses their long, purposeless night drives—him showing up at Gansey's at midnight and Gansey grabbing his keys as soon as he sees Ronan's itchiness and the telling looseness of his limbs, knowing alcohol hadn’t cut it for Ronan those nights. Being with all of them felt right, completely at odds to how he’d felt most of the time at Aglionby, but it was with Gansey that he felt the quietest. There is a feeling of being known in the space between them. In the unfathomably tight knit group of Blue, Noah, and Gansey with the recent addition of one Ronan Lynch, Ronan and Gansey immediately develop an unfathomable relationship no one else understands but the two of them, despite the fact that he and Blue met first and by all rights, on paper, he and Noah should be closer. But no one else needed to understand it. Both Ronan and Gansey knew that the brotherhood was forged in urgent, wakeful moments in the middle of the night, sometimes haunted by nightmares of death or helplessness on both sides. Sometimes meaningless. But either way, companionable.

One of the first evenings he’d hung out with the three of them, Gansey was talking about near death experiences, NDE’s he called them. “Noah had one,” he said, almost like a proud father.

Noah looked at Gansey strangely, as though waiting for him to say something else. Ronan would later learn that Noah expected Gansey to speak of his own.

“Sure you weren’t just high?” Ronan had asked.

“Hey. Don’t trivialize my NDE,” said Noah. Ronan hadn’t been sure where the lines were around each of them, how far he could toe. Noah had smiled a little crookedly to show Ronan he was joking. “I probably was high, actually,” he told Ronan later. “Don’t tell Gansey.”

Ronan thought that was one of the strangest things he’d ever heard. That Noah couldn’t remember that vital detail from that moment of his near death. Ronan remembers everything about the day his dad died, the wrongness of his color, of his skull, and his arms out helpless at his sides, the sun glimmering like silver lights in the puddles of the pocked dirt drive, the sharp pain at the base of his skull, climbing up and sliding down, paralyzing him. He remembers everything about the morning his mom didn’t wake up, the wrongness of her color and her expression and her arms in the same place Matthew had set them after holding her hand, the sudden emptiness of her room, as the though the air was different because her soul had vacated its mortal coil, the nausea of drinking well past his his tolerance, the nights clutching his torso. But he also wonders how many of his memories are warped. Does he even really remember what his mother sounded like anymore? Does he really remember the feel his father’s massive, barrel shaped ribcage and hero’s shoulders when he hugged him? Did he imagine that look on Adam’s face, that he was singling Ronan out, that Ronan had been touched by something authentic and awe-inspiring?

Gansey’s attention had followed Ronan. “You’ve had one too, haven’t you?”

The three of them hadn’t known what to make of him. Until, one night, Ronan stayed over and up all night with Gansey. “I wasn’t trying to kill myself,” he’d admitted.

Gansey looked up.

“When I—when I almost died.”

“Okay,” Gansey said, like _this is how we’re going to proceed…_

“It was…an accident.”

“I believe you.” Gansey’s eyes had not strayed to the scars on Ronan’s arms. “Did you see anything?”

Ronan closed his eyes. Thought of the cool darkness that started closing in, the peace of it, the lack of pain. He thought of the night horror from his dreams morphing into the IV. He thought of his brother’s watch over him, the evidence of it under his eyes, the lines in his forehead, his wrinkled suit.

He had answered, “No.”

In his quiet observation, Gansey has seen Ronan choking in same living space as Declan and has asked him to move in. Ronan hasn’t cast his lot just yet. Weirdly, he doesn’t want to disappoint Declan more than he already has. He also isn’t ready to disappoint Gansey by letting him see all of his phases. But already, he knows, it has not escaped any of their notice how slow Ronan is to warm up to them. He read of a horse ‘spooking easily’ once in a book. That term felt the most true when he applied it to himself.

Gansey's place is the Barrel. It’s a two story building which used to be a brandy factory, and it painfully reminds Ronan of the abandoned warehouse Adam took him to back in Henrietta. They all spend a lot of their free time in various levels of repose in the main room at the Barrel creating and trading inside jokes like an exclusive currency in a country all their own, playing gin rummy, compiling the most offensive culinary creations possible, or initiating mismanaged games of billiards. Sometimes Blue's roommmate Kate, who they inexplicably call Puck, shows up between her jobs. And sometimes Blue's other friend Joanna comes too. But it is Gansey, Blue, and Noah who have become Ronan’s center. All he needs to do is look around, find one of them, and he feels calm enough to keep going. Some days are easier than others. Sometimes he stays at the Barrel while Gansey and the others are at school or work. Sometimes he feels quiet enough to sleep on the floor with the light coming through the industrial windows in columns and spears. Sometimes he is so furious he could hit something—he should talk Gansey into installing a punching bag—knock all of Gansey's mint plants, and maps, and open books with their fluttering pages to the floor. But then he’d storm out so that he wouldn’t destroy this fledgling thing growing inside of him and between all of them, stomp down the stairs, and drive as fast as the city would let him until he got to wider interstates with more distance between each exit.

When Blue sets the Americano on the counter, he begrudgingly lays a five beside it and pushes the cup back towards her. She looks confused.

“It's for you," he says, walking out of the shop and into the drizzle.

Days like this, with the trees holding their breaths for the sudden molting of their leaves, fall walking a blade’s age into winter, reminded him too much of the Barns. Of home. Home. _Home._

He thinks about Gansey’s near death—an accident. Noah’s by another’s hand. His own by his own hand. He knows he needs to stop drowning inside of himself.

***

Adam hasn’t been feeling lonely, necessarily, because there is Henry and the rest of Litchfield and even Mrs. Wu seems like she is starting to like him a little. But he is feeling lonesome. At school especially. It’s different than he thought it would be. He tries not to feel maudlin about such a thought, but that lonesomeness follows him on his drive home after finishing up classes and his job at the university library. He’d actually gotten off a couple hours earlier than he thought he wood. His relief imbalanced his concern about making his last check stretch enough to make up for the next one being thin.

When he arrives at Litchfield that evening, hears the others in the kitchen, and lopes up to his room to eat the sandwich he hadn’t had time to eat that day. His lonesomeness follows him when he goes through his books, cast out on his bed more often than his tarot cards, taking notes on his assignments for the next days.

He had tried getting a hold of Persephone that day. Sometimes he could. But mostly they talked when she called him, since she would not answer the house phone and rarely carries her cell phone with her. Adam had reproached her for it once—“it’s not safe”—and he was repaid with an unbearable piercing look that saw exactly where his true fear lie.

After trying to call again, to no avail, he resigns himself to getting his reading done rather than catching up with her. Mostly, it would probably be a quiet call anyway, a poor substitute to their quiet evenings with tea after pie. And maybe that’s why he felt so lonesome, so singular. No one here knew him. He didn’t even know himself. But he’d felt _known_ before.

Henry appears in his doorway.

Adam catalogs his presence and returns to his book.

“Is that what you’re wearing?” asks Henry.

“You’re literally looking at what I am wearing and you’re asking what I’m wearing. Is this a philosophy experiment?”

“Would that be an experiment more suited to philosophy or psychology?”

Adam thinks about it. “Really, either, I guess.”

Henry laughs. “Is that what you plan to wear _to the party_?”

“What party?” Adam asks, but he is playing dumb. He suddenly feels a churning in his gut that probably shouldn’t precede what is generally considered to be diverting entertainment.

Henry gives him a look that means he knows he’s on to Adam. The sarcastic tone that follows confirms just this for Adam’s peace of mind. “I am pretty sure I was speaking in English, but sometimes I assume I’m translating to English, and then Mrs. Wu glares at me, and I know I’ve actually said something she understands, which means I must actually be talking in Korean.” By this time, Adam is resting his chin on his hand and raising his eyebrows to indicate the enormity of his effort to follow this. “But given that you looked at me and made comprehending faces, I did not think I could be erroneous in my conclusion that I was, in fact, speaking English.” 

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, we have established that.”

Sometimes it annoys Adam how alike they are. “I gotta get this done, Henry.”

“You have all weekend to get that done. You are coming with me.”

“Where?” 

“To a classmate’s party. We have also established this.”

“Hell, Cheng.”

“Hm.” Henry’s arm crosses his ribs and his other hand taps his chin. “Hell, indeed.” After a moment of his arms moving through Adam’s side of the closet at a speed which was truly a sight, he pulled out a charcoal, button-up Adam didn’t even recognize. “Here is what you should wear.”

Adam continues feeling put out and must look it, because Henry gives him a look that clearly indicates his familial bearing to Mrs. Wu and tosses the shirt on the bed. “I suppose the pants will do.”

“They’re jeans.” Adam isn’t sure if he’s defending them or contradicting Henry’s claim that they pants appropriate to go with what must surely be Adam’s only ‘nice’ shirt. (Is that actually his shirt? That’s really going to bother him.)

“Right, they say ‘I don’t care’ as much as the shirt makes it look like you do. So that way you won’t look like you’re dressing _up_ for the party.”

“Do people actually think this deeply about these things?”

“Yes, and if you weren’t an alien, you would be aware of the epistemological uncertainty that pervades one’s entire being when preparing for a social gathering with one’s peers.”

Adam just stares at his notes/laptop/book, determinedly not looking at Henry, hoping he will either give up or suddenly not be able to see him like the T. Rex in Jurassic Park. Henry was actually the one who showed him Jurassic Park—“and isn’t Jeff Goldblum just the portrait of masculine virility?” he’d asked admiringly. Adam thought he’d surely been joking but when he looked over, Henry’s chin was on his fist, gaze a little hazy.

Henry devastatingly sighs. “I’ll let you drive the Fisker.”

A giddy feeling bubbles up inside Adam. 

The Fisker does not disappoint.

So here he is at the damn party at a _warehouse_ , wearing his backpack with a 6 pack of pale ale he likes (a gift for the host), his critical theory text (because if he has even a spare second alone, he _will_ be getting ahead on the reading; if anyone asks, he will say his friend dragged him to the party when he still had 3 chapters to get through. This is a college party in the vicinity of Georgetown. Surely, this wouldn’t be too strange), and his Irish Folktales. He doesn’t go anywhere without the last, though he usually prefers to carry it so he can press his thumb against its uneven secondhand pages, but if walking into a college party with a backpack felt this weird, walking in with a book would feel downright ungracious.

Henry, for all of his talk about being unable to speak the way he thought, was an expert schmoozer. They move through the party looking for his friend form class. Henry catches Adam considering him as he charms another passerby.

“It’s a camouflage one adopts when you look and sound like me.”

Flustered, Adam shakes his head. “But you’re—”

“Henry!”

They both look at Henry’s addressor and Adam immediately feels small and dingy, as his Georgetown classmates made him feel. He’d spent his entire life comparing himself to others, measuring himself against their triumphs and failures, their attributes and foibles. But this friend of Henry’s surely did not have a failure to his name, nor a foible to his character.

They find themselves talking about their living situation at Litchfield, much to Adam’s discomfort, around a pool table with a cover on it. A striking lamp bearing stained glass in geometric patterning hung over it. Adam wonders how someone under the age of thirty owns a lamp that looks like this. He wants one for himself.

“That’s a bit far from campus.”

Rather than remarking on the number of people living at Litchfield, which is what Adam had dreaded, Gansey is concerned about something else entirely, something Adam hadn’t even bothered to think about because he knew how lucky he was to find something like Litchfield. Adam studies the furrow of Gansey’s brow. He is looking for chinks in the façade of distress, because surely a complete stranger cannot care this much about how far Adam is from campus.

“Nothing is too far for Adam Parrish. If his car breaks, he can fix it.” Henry says extra helpfully. Adam plans to give him a talking to as soon as Henry veers off for a shot or brightly colored mixed drink.

“Oh, you’re a mechanic?” The way Gansey says it is vaguely offensive, like he’s not trying to be a privileged prick, but it happens anyway. One of those guys that ‘didn’t mean it like that.’

“Yep,” Adam says, popping his ‘p’ and cutting a look at Henry before taking a drink.

“You should meet my best friend.”

“Hey!” Blue says, elbowing Gansey.

Gansey smiles down at her, and the obvious care in the split-second glance, the charm and reassurance, irritates Adam.

“He has a gorgeous E24.”

That feels like someone has punched his heart. “Yeah?” He takes a drink so he doesn’t have to speak. If this was the rate the evening would go, Henry would be dragging him back. He should probably stop after this one if he was going to drive and wanted to get anymore reading done before bed.

“He comes off really quiet to some, but I assure you, he’s a stand-up guy.”

Blue snorts. “Yeah, if that definition applied to assholes.”

Adam laughs as Gansey frowns. Blue looks definitively not sorry for her assignation. Henry looks stimulated by the dynamic between the solid moneyed boy and the scrappy patchwork girl. Adam smiles down into his drink, the pliable ties between all of them make him wistful.

“Be a good sport, Sargent,” says Gansey in a quiet, but nevertheless gently authoritative voice.

Blue looks quelled.

“Where did he get off to anyway? I don’t think he much likes these things.”

“Oh he’s fine if he’s got enough to drink. But he’s got Noah as a buffer. I just saw them out back.”

“Well,” Gansey says, clapping his hands together and seeming to second-guess the coolness of gesture midway through it, resulting in a limp, anti-climactic clasp. “Let’s go introduce you. Adam.” Gansey turns to gesture them toward the back of the loft, nodding at Henry. “Henry,” he says.

“Why, thank you, Gansey Man.”

Gansey looks inordinately pleased to be assigned any kind of nickname.

As they’re following Gansey’s peacock blue polo—‘not his worst’ Blue had whispered earlier when Adam remarked on its bright hue—he grabs a jacket from the back of a heavy wooden chair on the way out, and Adam leans in to whisper to Henry, “I might be getting jealous.” He feels playful, somehow loosened by the comfort with which Henry and he seem to slot with these people. 

“Not to worry, Adam Man. We room together, so we are as good as _jeong._ ”

“What is that?”

“It means, like, brothers. A feeling of attachment rather than biological relation. _Jeong_ is the reason you are wearing one of my good shirts rather than the…items you had on your side of the closet.”

Two things happen at once then. First, a quick exchange: as they walk out the back door, Henry whispers, “ _Jeong_ is the reason you are wearing _that_ shirt which is going to make _that_ man look twice at you.”

Adam laughs, lazily following Henry’s gaze—“Oh, the shirt’s going to do it, huh?”

The second: Just before Adam finds who Henry had locked onto, Gansey calls out, “Ronan.”

Adam’s legs are suddenly heavier. Everything is suddenly heavier, all of his limbs dissociating. The looseness that had made him a little less tired, his backpack a little less weighty a few moments ago now threatens to make his knees lose all sense of command from his brain.

Ronan turns to look and focuses on Adam behind Gansey.

A hysterical bubble of laughter rises in Adam at seeing him just as beautiful as the day he’d watched him walk across Aglionby right in front of Adam as though he didn’t know him, as though he hadn’t whispered “Oh, right. Hi,” says Adam and immediately wants a do-over of those words.

“Parrish.” This is all Ronan says, but his surname has never evoked more feeling. He said it like ‘I remember’. He said it like ‘I can’t afford to remember’. He said it like ‘Adam Parrish’, an impersonal confirmation, a farewell at a job interview.

“Oh,” Gansey looks oddly disappointed that he is not the one engineering their meeting. “Do you two know each other?”

Do they know each other? Adam doesn’t think so. Not anymore. He’s trying not to stare too desperately at Ronan while also trying to determine if he is at all affected. He isn’t outright scorning Adam like he did when he ended things. When they ended things. No. When Adam imploded everything. Now, here is Ronan who he has been lusting after for a year, dreaming about, standing here looking brutally real, like moving energy. Ronan’s expression is direct, strident, and adversely, insoluble. Adam is ravenous for a thought from his head.

Ronan has not looked away from Adam since catching sight of him—a small consolation. “We went to school together,” he says. It’s an incomplete truth and a generous clearing of the slate, at least for the sake of their friends assembled here, together, somehow. Looking at Ronan, Adam was not sure how he ever thought he could live without Ronan stalking the perimeter of his life, if not pouncing right back into the heart of it.

“School…” Gansey looks confused, because of course, Ronan doesn’t attend Georgetown, but has somehow assimilated into this school of wealthy Ivy League-attending fish. “Oh, high school?”

“Yes.” This is Adam. He is surprised he had the capacity to speak. The almost-year since they’d last spoken had sharpened Ronan; he looks healed but also wary. Haunted. Or hunted. Adam cannot help but think about the savage scars on his arm. His hair is shaved the shortest Adam has ever seen it. The 20 pounds of muscle he used to have on Adam was probably closer to 15, but now it’s definitely more like 30, some of it, impossible, more height, and the rest long, densely packed strength. He has his leather jacket still, but more than wearing it, he wields it like a part of himself. He is still brash and more primal and everything Adam wants to devour.

Henry steps forward—savior in satin purple paisley. “Small world, huh?” he says, warmly. “Henry Cheng.”

Ronan tears his eyes away from Adam for a beat to glare at Henry. Finally, he reaches out to shake his hand, stare already fixed on Adam again. Neither of them make a move to shake hands or hug or physically reunite in any way. It comforts rather than disheartens. It reminds Adam of the privacy which was so intricately bound up with what they allowed themselves to be together.

Blue says something quiet, just for Ronan. Ronan looks down at the ground, listening, slightly nods his head, then shakes it, expression tight.

Everyone is talking, but Adam can’t see or hear any of it. He tries to make his eyes follow the conversation, but it’s like trying to watch the ball during an Olympic tennis match, when all he wants to do is stare at one still person in the crowd that the ball keeps flying in front of. Ronan begrudgingly allows a guy with wispy white blonde hair throw his arm over his shoulders, never mind that he has to awkwardly reach up to do it. Adam relentlessly catalogs every touch and word Ronan exchanges with anyone else and tries to tamp down an explicable, primitive objection that rushes up inside of him.

Adam thinks he catches Ronan muttering “shithead” fondly. Now, it feels more like something is pinching his heart. Ronan notices him staring and shakes a hand through the blonde guy’s hair to get him back away, laughing. Then he steps away from the group, looking down to the left in a silent, contactless communication that Blue, Gansey, and Noah seem to clearly read. Adam is alight with envy that the three of them are now the ones who get to translate Ronan’s non-verbal communication so fluidly. As he moves away from his friends, he moves closer to Adam. He moves closer to Adam. He moves closer to Adam.

When his eyes meet Adam again, this time it feels confidential and it spears Adam all the way through. Adam thinks of Ovid— _why, by now your arrows practically know their own way to the target and feel less at home in their quiver than in me._

“How are you?” Ronan asks, and Adam is mesmerized. His voice is deeper, calmer or maybe just…smoothed out of its insecurities. He is, quite clearly, a man now. Adam wishes he would have paid more attention to every lean muscle, so that he had more definitive points for comparison right now.

“I’m alright. Good. I guess.” And he has forgotten how to converse. He rubs the back of his neck, choked with regret for letting them become this awkward moment.

“Want a drink?”

“Gansey, uh…” he holds up the can of Pabst.

“That’s just sad.”

Adam laughs and follows Ronan inside. As he steps through the door to the makeshift kitchen behind Ronan, someone makes a noise behind him. When he turns at the sound, desperate for something to focus on beside the fact that he is following _Ronan Lynch_ into the kitchen, presumably for something ‘less sad’, he bumps into Ronan who slows to let someone pass in front of him. The sound of the party recedes and Adam breathes in the cologne of leather and Ronan’s soap. It takes him to the Barns, to his bedroom, to the library with the lances of dust-laden light where they kissed. When he snaps out of it, his hand has drifted to Ronan’s waist to steady them both; the leather is soft with time and so very real under Adam’s hand, and though he cannot feel it, he knows that the body beneath the leather is solid and warm. Ronan turns his head just slightly, the way he did outside as he left his friends. Adam drops his hand. He _knows_ it’s not his rightful place anymore. He isn’t sure he ever deserved that place. Ronan moves then, as though Adam’s touch, however light was holding him in place. Just the prospect of that, despite the impossibility, makes Adam light-headed.

“Do you want to put your backpack down in my room?”

“You live here?”

“I sleep here a lot.”

Heat washed through Adam’s veins, over his face. What did that mean?

In one of the upstairs rooms, that is mostly empty but for a mattress on the floor, black ineligible shapes strewn about the floor in the half yellow half navy light of the dark room, and a cage, Adam, sets his backpack just inside the door. Just as he bends down, something flies through the window. After a breath, he regains his composure to find Ronan, face lit in halves by the light in the hallway and the shadow of the room, assessing him, thoughtlessly putting his hand up for the raven on his shoulder to nibble his fingers. He hates that Ronan knows the bruised history behind why he’d startled so bad. But as he focuses, that abhorrence for himself at being seen as weak fades, as Chainsaw turned her head to the side to eye him.

“Hi, Chainsaw. Remember me?”

Chainsaw gently bites his finger in acknowledgement, just once. Adam looks at Ronan, afraid of what he will see there, but Ronan hides his forehead in Chainsaw’s feathers. “Don’t be pissy,” he tells her, and Adam’s heart punches his breast bone once, painfully, at the smile lifting the corner of Ronan’s mouth.

She flies over to perch on her cage, and play with something on top of it. It could either be a real dead animal or a floppy cat toy. Adam is glad the light is off.

Downstairs, Ronan bends down to look in the fridge. He returns with a yellow can with familiar writing on it. Adam holds it up. Sierra Nevada Fantastic Haze Imperial.

With a shrug, hand braced on the counter behind him, Ronan says, “I mean, it’s not as good as that shit Eric brought to fundraiser, but.”

They both knew that had been bottom shelf shit, whatever it was. Rocket fuel.

“Holy shit.” Adam laughs, giddy that Ronan remembers that, giddy at the coincidence. He feels a little breathless.

“What? You want a bitch drink?”

“No, it’s just…I brought this same kind. Sierra Nevada. The other one. Hazy Little Thing, I think?”

“You brought your own beer? That is such an Adam Parrish thing to do.”

Adam stiffens, annoyed and embarrassed. “I brought it for the host. That’s an everyone thing to do.”

Ronan looks a little skittish, looking down at his arms crossed over his chest at one point, then down at his boots as he put his hands in his jacket. Adam can’t believe he still has those leather wristbands.

Ronan clears his throat. “How do you know Dick?”

“Dick?” Adam asks with a confused huff of a laugh. God he was nervous, and already, this beer was hitting him. Or maybe it was just Ronan. He checked the percentage—nope, it was the beer.

Ronan’s eyes are wide like he might be an idiot. “Richard ‘Dick’ Gansey.”

“Thanks for clearing that up. I don’t actually know him. Not before tonight anyway. My roommate Henry does.”

“Roommate?” Ronan asks, looking up, confused.

“Well, yeah. I couldn’t stay at home, going here.”

Ronan looks away. Adam thinks his chest might be flushed just above the mangled crew neck of his thin T-shirt, but it’s dark in here, the night relentless against the naked windows, so he can’t be sure.

“You didn’t have to do this,” Adam says, holding up the beer. “Thank you.”

Ronan shrugs like the offer means nothing, but Adam isn’t fooled. It’s not that it means nothing. It means Ronan won’t take responsibility for how much it does mean. “Figured you wouldn’t want to have this, reunion or whatever the fuck this is out there. Plus it’s loud.”

This surprises and humbles Adam. His fingers unconsciously drift to his ear before he can stop them. “You remember,” he says, voice soft, looking down at his drink, thumbing the tab.

“Of course I fucking remember. I didn’t get amnesia.” Ronan looks steadily at him, not as wary.

“God, it’s good to see you, Ronan.”

Ronan’s expression doesn’t change.

“I’ve missed you,” continues Adam, emboldened by a third of this can.

Ronan’s eyes cut away.

“I was worried about you when you left school,” he presses. He wants _something._ Some kind of acknowledgement of the past, of what they were, of how much they had. Some harkening back to _You’re going to fucking kill me, Parrish._

“Oh yeah?”

“God, of course, Ronan. You dropped off the face of the planet.” He tries to keep the bitterness—no, the hurt, out of his tone. He cannot be sure how successful the attempt was.

“Yeah well, we didn’t hang out much at school, did we Parrish?”

Adam can hear his heart pounding. He chokes on his guilt. He can’t say a fucking word.

“What is happening in your brain when you just sit there and don’t say a word?”

This quiet, calmly asked question surprises Adam. He’s actually flattered that Ronan thinks there is anything in his head when he is so wrung out he can’t think of a single thing to say, not even an observation on the weather.

“How’s…uh...” Ronan trails off, rubbing his chest. “Rachel?”

“Oh God, that wasn’t…There wasn’t…We weren’t compatible.”

Ronan grunts.

“What?”

“I probably could have told you that, Parrish.”

“I bet you would have if we’d been talking. But you made sure that didn’t happen.”

“You fucking left me, Adam,” he says in a low voice, glaring right at Adam with his colorless eyes.

Adam remembers _relinquo_ and braces for impact. “You told me to leave.”

“Yeah, and you did. Congratulations. You know how to follow directions.”

Adam feels sick. In all his imagining of how they might reconnect, it didn’t go anything like this. “Are you telling me if I hadn’t done what you told me, then…you wouldn’t have—” he chokes on the word _abandoned._ “Ignored me.”

“That’s not really why I left. I was done with that shithole.”

Adam doesn’t know if this is a collective assignation to Aglionby, Henrietta, and Adam. He laughs nastily. “Only a millionaire would call Aglionby a shithole.”

Ronan holds his can between his knees, looking down. He looks pained. Adam hates it. He wants Ronan to look at him. He wants to cry. He wants to scream. He still wants, more than anything, to slide his hand behind Ronan’s neck, to stand chest to chest, not to force Ronan to bend to his will but… to feel Ronan want to submit to him.

“I was wondering if that’s why you left though.”

Ronan looks at him then. He remembers telling Adam that he couldn’t breathe there. Adam can feel the understanding pass through the connection between them like a physical thing he could touch. The way it had always been.

“Maybe you’re telepathic.”

Adam realizes Ronan never even knew about his tarot cards. That they wouldn’t let Adam forget about his Knight of Wands. “You know…I used to think.” Adam goes abruptly red. He feels it all over.

“What?” Ronan asks like scissors biting paper.

“I used to think I could read your mind at times.”

“You mean in bed.” He says it without inflection, flat.

Adam nods, swallows, wills his face not to turn red. When did Ronan go from the hungry colt asking to take off their clothes to _this…_ god? The realization is heady: Adam contributed something to the experience that led to that transition. “And afterwards. I don’t know.”

“I know what you mean.”

Adam wants to tell him how good he looks. He wants to say it and mean it without coming off desperate. His face must be broadcasting it in spite of him.

Ronan rubs a hand down his face. “Fuck. I feel like I’m in a dream.” He drops his hand, stares heavily at Adam, then stands up. He sets his can down with force on a shelf next to him. “Anyway, I gotta get out of here. Appointments and shit.”

Adam touches his arm. Ronan stops.

“You good to drive?” Adam asks, his voice lower than he intended it to be. The memory of it, of everything, crackles between them.

Ronan pulls his arm back, unsubtly enough that Adam gets the message. Ronan forces his shark’s grin. “Always.”

***

Alone, at night, Ronan was a different kind of creature than during the day, or at Gansey’s soothing side, or letting Noah rope him into ramp-building, or spinning with Blue on Gansey’s office chair until they got sick. On the streets, he was the Graywaren. People might think he was careless or fearless and that was why he raced, but it was the opposite. It was his experience with death, knowing that the two sovereignties who had brought him and everything he had known into this world were gone, _somni. Mortem. Vitam finivit._ This made him afraid of the speed he nurtured with something his foot on the gas pedal and fingers, deceptively careless, draped over the stick shift. It was in spite of his fear, the control he exercised over it, that he found his fix.

Then there was Kavinsky. He was equally disgusted and thrilled by him. Even his name slithering off his tongue felt lascivious. But there was a kind of truth they shared, the truest form of communication Ronan actually felt adept at speaking. Turns out, it was when he stopped half-heartedly looking for trouble and did it with frantic intention, ticking off boxes on a racer’s wishlist, that he finally found it. So he drives. It’s late. The streets are as empty as they ever are, which is to say not empty at all. But everything seems quieter and louder at the same time.

Lately, Ronan has felt like a firefly trapped under a mason jar, protected and separate. Though he moves through the outside world, it can only touch his skin, not the other part of himself, the part on the inside. Until tonight. When he looked past Gansey and saw Adam in the Barrel’s parking lot, he felt all of the cold air hit him. He could suddenly take a full breath again, but it was too much. He thought he’d gotten over this, but seeing him standing there, just as shell-shocked to see Ronan, told him that he was not over Adam and probably never would be. But then, he’d known that. He couldn’t stay one more moment under Adam's power when he had absolutely no right to be.

Yes, he remembers how it felt to realize he was an idiot for believing Adam could be happy with just him. And seeing K, who was like a prince among these streets, this anarchist’s playground, choose him, when he didn’t even know Ronan, above the friends he’s known for years gratified him. See? Ronan Lynch was wantable, worthy of a crush. But no. That wasn’t it either. Not just attraction. Ronan and Kavinsky spoke a different dialect than what he and Adam had spoken, but it skirted the same edge as the one Ronan had only let himself communicate when Adam touched him, commanded him. _Fuck_. He had to stop living in those dreams. He needed to bury the past and pour his libations. But it wasn’t dead. Everything in him blazed to painful, technicolor life when he’d seen Adam tonight. And the way Adam had looked at him with open favor, with caution and with care. There was something almost there that slipped through Ronan’s grasp like a slithering balloon string. Maybe it was the quiet promise in his anger at Ronan for going silent, in his confession that he missed Ronan: _I still want this_. It vibrated through him, ricocheted in his head until he felt sick with it. No, sick with himself, for playing into K, for playing into Adam. His thing with K, his morbid fascination with how it would play out, was whatever, but acting like he’s still interested is a lie.

So he arrives at Kavinksy’s spot with that knowledge as his armor. Even if he didn’t already know where to find him, he would be able see the radiation glow of the sterile floodlights from off the highway, could hear the thumping of irregular base, distant and tinny through his open windows.

He skids to a stop, nose-to-nose with the Evo, but Kavinsky is lost somewhere in the bodies clotting the washed out parking lot. Monochromatic grass grows up from the cracks of the monochromatic asphalt. A Volvo sits burning from within, while guys congregate around it, waving bottles and cans, cigarettes and other things that smoke. Something slithers inside Ronan, as lascivious as the roll of K’s name off his tongue, leaving a charred trail of anger, and ultimately, erasure in its wake. He clenches his hands once on the wheel, trying to ground himself, but it’s to no avail. He’s a Molotov cocktail, and it feels like the flame has nearly reached the fuel.

As he gets out, the cheese-grater scream of the music drills into him. He leans on the still-warm hood of his car, arms crossed, watching. Eventually, the newcomer is noticed.

“Lynch!” Some of the guys yell. Skov, Ronan things, not caring enough to squint them down. Kavinsky’s closest crew call themselves the Dream Pack. Once, in a meditative mood, K explained that they anointed themselves that because they were ‘living the dream, man’.

The music morphs and interchanges with someone else’s system playing something more in line with his own thumping tastes. He lets it vibrate his cells, wishes he’d thought to bring something to drink. He finally picks K out of the crowd. He’s shirtless, hand splayed over his flat ribcage, as he stares, expressionless up at an explosion in the sky. Ronan misses what it is, because he’s watching the red-orange glow turn Kavinsky into a ghoul, then K turns and smirks at Ronan like he’d tracked his arrival.

Ronan is a Molotov cocktail. The past is something that had happened to a different version of himself, a version that could be lit and hurled away. He doesn't know whether he wants to throw it or explode.

Eventually Kavinsky makes his way over, white frames around black reflective insect’s eyes. Ronan hates that he can’t tell where the bastard is looking.

“Hey, Lady,” says K, rolling a joint as he stands nearly toe to toe with Ronan. “You bring anything for the price of your admission?”

Ronan never finds out the penalty for showing up to a substance party without a substance, because Prokopenko appears with a lighter.

“Get my smokes, will you?” K tells him distractedly, licking the joint to seal it and plucking the lighter from Proko’s spaceship hand. “Fucking _Leer_ - _uh_ helpin’ herself all night.”

‘Fucking Leer-uh’ is nowhere in sight. Prokopenko, Kavinsky’s perpetual hanger-on, lopes off, one shoulder higher than the other.

Ronan watches K—he can watch little else with Kavinsky standing this close, the dark side of the moon crossing the sun—as he lights and puffs the spliff to life.

“The harder they come, the harder they fall,” he inexplicably announces to the joint with a hand to his concave chest.

“Are you going to be indisposed for long?” Ronan finally asks.

“Don’t rush me, man. I ain’t your bitch. You come to my neighborhood, harshin' my vibe?” His tone gradually diffuses from outraged to conversational. “Check out what I’m packing now.” Kavinksy nods his head to the car, handing Ronan his joint. Ronan looks at it.

“You suck it, Lynch. I’m sure you and Dickie are well-versed.”

Ronan hits it because he wants to even the playing field, wants no excuses for how badly he is going to annihilate the Evo tonight.

He reaches out to help with the hood, because either K is too high or too weak to lift it.

Kavinsky slaps his arm away. “Woah, woah! Hands off. This isn’t your grandmammy’s Pontiac TransAm,” he says, laughing.

Ronan kind of wants to laugh too. Instead he says, “My grandmother is dead.” He doesn’t even know if he _has_ a grandmother.

K finally gets it open, revealing the shiny after-market engine block. “Yeah, I hear the Lynches have short shelf lives.”

Ronan boils. _Not yet._ He tightens his own leash, leaning into the choke of the collar, because Gansey isn’t here to do it.

“Laid to rest in the family plot, eh.”

“That’s none of your damn business and I’ll thank you to stay out of my personal affairs,” he says lightly, the complete opposite of his inner landscape which is black, black, _black._

Kavinsky smirks, dropping the hood. “Got a present for you.”

He flicks something at Ronan’s chest. Ronan reaches up to catch it. It’s an ID with Ronan’s age listed as 87. But the picture is his. It dizzies him how K must have gotten it. That he put effort toward acquiring it. Friends at the police department? Was there an Aglionby headshot out there on the internet somewhere? It was a forgery. As good as his dad’s. Better maybe. Since in the end, Niall was caught.

Proko has reemerged from the revelry, warm firelight and cold overhead light at war on the battlefield of his body. He chortles at a private joke as K hands him the joint and waves him off.

“You like?” Kavinsky asks, scratching his jutting hip, and staring down in admiration of his work.

“I’ll be able to get into any bingo game in town. Thanks.”

When he looks up, K is watching him in the quietest way Ronan has ever seen Joseph Kavinsky exist. Or maybe it’s only quiet in comparison to the deafening debauchery surrounding them; a woman’s voice speaks clearly through the vibrating techno, giving it an eerie, Dante’s Inferno feel. He’s waiting for something, but Ronan isn’t here to talk tonight.

Once, in a conversation completely divorced from the normal vein of their exchanges, Kavinsky had asked him, “You think your god sees people like me? And if that’s the case, how is it anyone’s god? Put that in your thesis and smoke it!”

Ronan didn’t have the answers then. He certainly doesn’t have them now.

“Enough fucking around.” Kavinsky slams the Evo’s hood. “What’djyou come here for, Lynch?” When Ronan says nothing, stilling holding the fake ID, Kavinsky belligerently repeats, “What do you want, Lynch?”

“Are we gonna go or what?”

“Oh, I’ve been ready to go. But I don’t know if you’re ready to take me there.” K steps closer. “Are you? Ready? Ronan?” He says this into Ronan’s ear.

A chorus of suggestive sounds rises above the music and cacophony of glass bottles crashing and illegal fireworks discharging.

Ronan takes a breath, says back into his ear, at a normal, untempered volume, “If you don’t fuck up the shift to 4th. We’ll see if you can keep up.” He feels his mouth pull into a thin smile.

“That’s how it’s going to be? Hard to get?”

Ronan isn’t used to having his every micro expression so easily read, except for Adam when—shit, maybe Parrish had been onto something with his mind-reading theory. (And here, he has a moment of cognitive dissonance where he can hardly believe he gets to think of Adam in present tense.) Or maybe Ronan really is this transparent, because K isn’t even the same league as Adam. 

_No one would have to know._ Ronan should have known, all those months ago, that he was turning his power over to Adam with those words. And it’s fine. He wouldn’t have changed any of his decisions. He didn’t mind being under Adam’s power. It was the easiest thing he’d ever been. Easier than brother and son and boy and dreamer. He just wished it didn’t hurt so much now. He wished he wasn’t so deeply embedded in his chest.

He can’t pretend this will scratch the itch anymore. Fucking Adam. And also fucking Noah intently upgrading his skateboard while binging some ridiculous baking show from the couch; fucking Gansey with his wild after-hours hair, propped on his side with a regal elbow, poring over maps or his ongoing cardboard construction of Ronan’s hometown where Gansey’s king supposedly laid; fucking Blue busting in, pretending like she left something until inevitably becoming absorbed into their evening and pretending as though that hadn’t been her plan all along. Now, this dance felt too much like playacting, a farce. Too much like a lie.

Kavinsky latches onto his wrist, trapping Ronan against the car. He feels a detached thrill at someone slipping the control from his hands. He wonders if he’s using Kavinsky the way Adam had used him.

“Ohhh. Little Lynch liked that.”

Ronan stares hard at him, ready to rip off his glasses and throw his fist into Kavinsky’s skull. But that would be admitting something.

“Back off.”

“Alright.” K lets go and saunters around Ronan to his door. “I’ll let you take your _frustration_ out on the _street._ ” Which, they both know, is another way of saying _on Kavinsky_ on the street.

A murmur of excitement from the spectators dews Ronan’s skin. Belying none of his anticipation, he smoothly inserts himself behind the extreme tint of the windows, night against night.

As they drive, Ronan lets go of _why_ he was doing this, why he was here, and gives himself over to the BMW, to the road, to the fear of death, and the soft control he maintains over it.

Ronan wins, like he always does. He gets out to the sounds of the party, louder than before, glimmering like the heat of a bonfire. Kavinsky is only seconds behind him. When he stops, the Evo’s bumper inches from Ronan, he storms out and into Ronan’s space again.

“Fag.”

“Russian.”

They glare at each other until Ronan makes to get back into the BMW. “Until next time.”

“You think you’re better than me?”

“I just won, so…”

He grabs Ronan’s arm, thumb softly brushing the raised scars. “This shit.” He almost whispers it so the closest of their cheerleaders don’t hear.

Still revving from the race, he throws Kavinsky on his hood, punches him. Despite the excited howls and whoops from the crowd, he’s not into it. Kavinsky springs forward, head-butting Ronan. Ronan has no idea whether it’s intentional or not. He immediately feels the warm wash of blood from his left nostril, making no move to wipe it away. He imagines it will taste salty and zinging on his tongue.

Kavinsky settles against his hood, massaging his jaw. He nods to Ronan’s arm.

“This is dark. This isn’t no game. I get that. I live that. You think he’ll ever understand that?” The one time Gansey came with him to one of Kavinsky’s parties, K’s jaw about fell on the ground. K didn’t get it though. It wasn’t even like that.

“I don’t need him to understand that.” In fact, he almost needed Gansey to _not_ understand that part of him.

“Don’t you? You’re tougher than I thought then. Go on back to your master, then.”

This didn’t hurt Ronan though. He’d always been better with a master. Maybe he didn’t like it, but he was learning that’s what he needed. It was his freely given submission to being mastered which sated him—his father, Adam, Gansey. When it was taken by Declan and what K was advertising, he would not submit. It felt too much like giving up freedom. He takes one last look at the crowd, one more quick, dismissive look at Kavinsky, before opening the door to his shark-nosed BMW. He drops inside, leg still anchored to the asphalt crumbling underneath his boot.

Kavinsky jabs a finger in his direction. “You are _shitting me_ , man!”

Ronan slams the door. He watches K watch him through the windshield before he is swallowed, laughing, by the crowd.

Once Gansey had said people like K didn’t matter and this had hurt Ronan. Even before K’s belief that God couldn’t see him. It had hurt, because if it was true, then Ronan, who socialized with Kavinsky and got something out of it, even if finite and only grazing the itch, he sometimes didn’t matter too. And that was a dangerous train of thought that led him down the familiar road to the cold hard bench in St. Agnes, looking over through the white noise inside of himself to find his brother’s betrayed face.

Ronan comes back drunk, but only because he downed almost an entire 12-pack in the Barrel’s parking lot to scrub the memory of Kavinsky asking what he wanted. Blue is there when he stumbles in, tripping over some detritus from the party. She gives him a look that is almost painful. He feels like she is seeing right through his skin. He wants to put his fist through a wall rather than anyone see this. His weakness. Emotions he can’t shut off. Love he can’t let go of, loss he can’t get back.

Blue casts her eyes between the two of them, Ronan’s awkward, doe-eyed drunkenness by the door, too amped to sit down, and Gansey’s absolute need to care for him bleeding into the very large room. She respects the strange way they work, even if it does make her feel a little cut out.

“Anyway, I have work tomorrow. That’s what us blue collar folk do,” Blue says with a grandfatherly pat to Ronan’s shoulder on her way out. Ronan and Gansey both watch her go. Ronan stays facing the door, and listening to her receding steps. He isn’t sure how something so small can make so much damn noise.

“Are you ready to talk about what happened earlier?”

He turns back to Gansey now, the yellow light gleaming gold off his glasses with his self-conscious swipe of his hair.

“Fuck, Dick. I can’t even sit down,” Ronan bemoans, awkwardly collapsing to the floor. His ass is precariously close to Henrietta’s town hall. This was probably the closest he’d ever be to Henrietta again. He’d take it.

“I’ve never seen you look that before. When you saw Adam.”

Ronan nods, mostly to resign himself to the fact that this conversation is happening.

“We fucked in high school.”

Gansey sputters in an entirely Gansey fashion. “Oh, I…Well, I can certainly see…I can see…how…I can see the appeal.”

“Jesus, Gansey. Should I send out the engagement announcement? Gansey and Parrish? Would your couple name be Pansey?”

“Ronan, I would _never._ ”

“Chill man. I know. Bros before hoes.”

Gansey is looking at him like he doesn’t much like this version of Ronan. “Is he?”

“What?” Ronan asks, lost.

“Is that what happened? Is Adam a h…”

Ronan bites back his laugh when he realizes the direction of Gansey’s question. “You can say it.”

“You know exactly what I mean, Ronan.”

“Yeah. But I wanna hear you say the word.”

Gansey obstinately returns to his map.

“Gansey,” Ronan says, shamelessly wielding his correct name, which he does so rarely that Gansey would have to break. He is so close. Ronan throws his full hand down. “It would make me feel better.”

“Is Adam a…” Gansey levels Ronan with a long-suffering look. “Hoe?”

Now that his fucking with Gansey has reached its peak, he has too much time to stop and think about the subject matter.

“I mean, I don’t know what he is now. But…back then…no, he wasn’t.”

Gansey nods. And this is how it ends. He doesn’t press Ronan for anything else. He knows Ronan’s limits better than Ronan does.

Ronan falls back, so that he’s half on Gansey’s mattress on the floor, his ass and legs off of it. The edge of the mattress is digging into his lower back, but he isn’t moving from this spot.

“You crashing here?”

Ronan groans like ‘leave me alone, I’m sleeping’ in response. He listens to Gansey get up, do late night pre-bedtime rituals that mean nothing to an insomniac. Distantly, he hears Gansey’s socked steps get closer, and then a blanket drops over his face.

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: I've gifted this to [charactershoes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/charactershoes/pseuds/charactershoes) for inspiring me with her Fleabag AU [Seek Ye the Living](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21128534/chapters/50280608) (because holy FUCK!) and all of her support on the conception of this fic. Major heart eyes, babe. Is that offensive? I'unno, I'm drunk. Is _that_ offensive? Look, I'm channeling my inner Ronan, okay?
> 
> A/N 2: You need not have watched/read Normal People to enjoy this fic, I hope. Obvs, I adored the show, and the whole time I watched it, thinking 'my god, this is Ronan and Adam'. So I hope you love the combo as much as I do. Let me know here or at my tumblr: [likeapunchinthegut](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/likeapunchinthegut-blog). The title is from TS Eliot's 'The Wasteland'.
> 
> Thank you for giving my Pynch fic baby a chance!


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